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The Relation Between Early Implantation and the Acquisition of Grammar

Cochlear implantation gives many profoundly deaf children access to auditory input and enables them to develop spoken language. Cochlear implanted (CI) children develop language faster than when they had been fitted with hearing aids alone (HA) (Svirsky et al., 2000). Previous research by our team shows that children implanted before 15 months show even faster-than-normal language learning rates. This has led us to hypothesize that, by the age of 3, early implanted children will have closed the initial gap with their typically developing (TD) peers (Coene et al., in press). From this age onwards, more complex morphosyntactic development begins. The acquisition of grammatical elements is particularly dependent on sufficient auditory access, as these elements are acoustically non-salient. Possible deficits in the perception of grammatical elements may explain why profoundly deaf children with hearing aids are often severely delayed in the acquisition of inflection morphemes (Brown, 1984; Norbury et al., 2001). When comparing the HA children with the CI children, the latter group uses more inflectional endings in their conversational speech. Moreover, benefits are observed for children with longer implant experience (Spencer et al., 1998). The objective of the present study is to investigate the verbal morphosyntactic development of CI children compared to their TD and HA peers. Possible long-term beneficial effects of early implantation will be given close attention.