Syntactic Maturity of Spontaneous Speech and Elicited Imitations of Hearing-Impaired Children

Abstract

Two language measures, designed for normal-hearing children, were applied to a sample of 52 severely and profoundly hearing-impaired children between four and 15 years of age. The Developmental Sentence Analysis (Lee, 1974) was used to assess their spontaneous language and the Carrow Elicited Language Inventory (Car-row, 1974a) to assess imitated language. The correlation between scores on the two measures was similar to that found by Carrow (1974b) for normal children (r = .75). However, there was little relation between either measure and reading achievement in hearing-impaired children. A subsample of children retested one year later showed those who remained in a school for the deaf showed greater improvement in their ability to imitate while those who had been integrated into schools with normal-hearing children improved most in spontaneous language. Over half of the hearing-impaired subjects scored below normal hearing three-year-olds on both measures. Caution is advised, however, in applying these norms to hearing-impaired children. The spontaneous language of these children differed from that of younger hearing children who received similar overall scores in the normative sample. The hearing-impaired subjects tended to use more mature constructions but used fewer correct structures per utterance.