Examining spoken language input to infants with cochlear implants and its relationship to language outcomes

This study compared spoken language input to deaf/hard of hearing (DHH) children with cochlear implants, and two sets of hearing controls: age and hearing-age matches. Using daylong audio-recordings from 6-32 month-olds (n=16/group), we examined whether systemic variation in thirteen language input metrics predicted children’s emerging language outcomes. Language input to the DHH group contained shorter sentences and more auditory words (e.g., “loud”) than input to hearing-age-matches, and slightly fewer adult words than input to age-matches. Despite the modest input differences, DHH children produced fewer mature vocalizations than age-matched peers; their vocalizations also increased less robustly with age. Regression models indicated that age, hearing status, noise, input quantity, overlapping speech, and input MLU collectively predicted >50% of variance in children’s vocal maturity. These results suggest differences in children’s access to language input play a larger role than the relatively small systematic input differences across DHH and hearing children.