Reading Strategies and Cognitive Skills in Children with Cochlear Implants

• The present study investigated WM capacity, lexical access, phonological skills and reading ability in 6 children with cochlear implants (CI), attending grades 1-3. For each test measure, the individual performance of the children with CI was compared to a grade-matched comparison group of children with normal hearing. Performance was also studied in relation to demographic factors. The results reveal that the children with CI have specific difficulties in tasks of phonological skills and phonological working memory (WM) where nonwords are used as test stimuli. They do not seem to have problems with phonological processing of words for which they have a well defined phonological representation. They also experienced relatively more difficulties in tasks on lexical access without any contextual info. We suggest that children with CI are particularly efficient in using compensatory strategies in situations where their auditory perception does not provide sufficient information to correctly match the incoming speech signal to a corresponding representation in the long-term phonological storage. The children with CI in this study are skilled readers, both for decoding of words and nonwords and for reading comprehension. They may use both orthographic and phonological reading strategies although most of them seem to be dependent on phonological decoding to some extent.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Psykologi -- Psykologi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Psychology -- Psychology (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Cochlear implants

working memory

phonological skills

lexical access

reading ability

MEDICINE

MEDICIN

Publikations- och innehållstyp

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