Computer-assisted intervention for children with hearing impairment : Cognitive factors and phonological change

• Thirty-two children with hearing impairment (HI) using cochlear implants (CI) and/or hearing aids (HA), and sixteen with normal hearing (NH) participated in a computer-assisted intervention study that focused on perceiving and memorizing phonemic sounds. The first purpose was to study cognitive abilities in NH and HI children, how they related to phonological processing skills (PhPS) pre intervention and to phonological growth post intervention. The second purpose was to analyze children’s performance at different fine-grained levels of phonological processing, i.e. how they manipulated, stored and produced phonological entities of different size with or without semantic content. This was put in relation to children’s type of auditory stimulation (electrical; bilateral CI, bimodal: CI + HA and acoustical; bilateral HA). Results showed significant correlations between complex working memory and PhPS in children with HI but not in children with NH. This suggests different cognitive strategies in the children when dealing with phonological processing tasks. Poor phoneme discrimination was the strongest predictor of phonological growth in the children with HI as a function of training. Thus, the computer-assisted program was beneficial for HI children with weak initial phoneme discrimination skills. Children with CI showed reduced performance at fine-grained levels of receptive phonological processing but not on expressive phonological lexical tasks.

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