Comparison of Definitional skills in school-age children with cochlear implants and normal hearing peers

OBJECTIVE: The auditory experience is important because makes a major contribution to the development of speech, language, cognitive, and social skills. Knowledge of the lexicon has been increased throughout life. Input factors and linguistic and metalinguistic knowledge are effective factors in the acquisition of definitional skills. This study was done to investigate definitional skills in cochlear-implanted (CI) children and their typically developing (TD) peers. MATERIALS & METHODS: A total of 46 third-grade primary school children (16 with cochlear implants and 30 their TD peers) were recruited. The verbal definitional task included 14 common high-frequency nouns and 11 common high-frequency verbs. All definitions were scored for both content (semantic) and grammatical forms. Statistical analysis was conducted to compare the definitional skills between the two groups. RESULTS: There were significant differences between CI children and their TD peers for word definition skills in both categories of content and form (p<0.001). The results showed the mean scores of content and form aspects of word definition in the TD group were approximately twice higher than the CI ones (M±SD=133±28 and M±SD= 78±23, respectively). CONCLUSION: Children with CI may have trouble with definitional skills. It seems that the lower scores of CI children in definitional skills were due to a lack of auditory experience. Considering interventions on definitional skills in CI children is suggested.