Early grammar‐building in French‐speaking deaf children with cochlear implants: A follow‐up corpus study

• Published in: International journal of language & communication disorders 2023-07, Vol.58 (4), p.1204-1222
• Main Authors: Le Normand, Marie‐Thérèse, Thai‐Van, Hung
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Age Differences; Assistive Technology; atypical development; Child language; Children; Clitics; cochlear implant; Cochlear implants; Cognitive science; Corpus linguistics; Deafness; Dependency grammar; Determiners; early grammar; English language; French; French language; Function words; Grammar; Grammar lexicon relationship; Grammatical relations; Human health and pathology; Infants; Inflection (Morphology); Language; Language Acquisition; Life Sciences; Mean length of utterance; Morphological complexity; Morphology; Native language acquisition; Nouns; Participles; Pragmatics; profound deafness; Pronouns; Sensory Organs; Speaking; Speech Communication; Statistical analysis; Syntactic complexity; Syntactic structures; Transplants & implants; Verbs
• ISSN: 1368-2822; 1460-6984
• DOI: 10.1111/1460-6984.12854

Background One of the most consistent findings reported in the paediatric cochlear implant (CI) literature is the heterogeneity of language performance observed more in grammatical morphology than in lexicon or pragmatics. As most of the corpus studies addressing these issues have been conducted in English, it is unclear whether their results can be generalized to other languages. In particular, little is known about languages known for their grammatical complexity, such as French. Aims The aim of this corpus study was to compare the productive use of function words (FWs) and some agreement features (AGRs) in children with CIs and children with typical development (TD) matched for mean length of utterance in words (MLUwords), a general index of grammatical complexity, and auditory experience, as measured by hearing age (HA) and chronological age (CA), respectively. Methods & Procedures Natural speech samples from 116 monolingual French‐speaking children, including 40 children with CIs followed longitudinally and 76 TD children, were collected. FWs and AGRs were analysed using a Part of Speech Tagger (POS‐T) from the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES). Outcomes & Results The two groups differed by 3 years for HA and CA. No effect of family socio‐economic status (SES) was found in the CI group. Stepwise regression analyses showed that the two groups did not share the same predictors of MLUwords: plurals and determiners predicted MLUwords in children with CIs, at 2 and 3 years of HA, whereas feminine markers and subject‐pronouns were found to best predict MLUwords in TD children at 2 and 3 years of CA. Structural equation models (SEMs), a combination of confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and path analysis, yielded a different hierarchical structure of grammatical relations (GRs). Selective difficulties affecting verbal clitics and other pronominal forms were found specifically in the CI group (object‐pronouns, reflexive, relative and past participles). Dependency grammar analysis confirmed these contrasting developmental profiles in multiword utterances, such as preposition/nouns, subject/verbs, and verb/determiner/nouns. Conclusions & Implications Atypical grammatical patterns in children with CIs reflect a specific architecture of syntactic dependencies of FWs underpinning morphological complexity and syntactic connectivity. Clinical implications are discussed for assessment and intervention planning. What This Paper Adds What is already known on