Despite modern hearing aids, children with hearing impairment often have only restricted access to spoken language input during the 'critical' years for language acquisition. Specifically, a sensorineural hearing impairment affects the perception of voiceless coronal consonants which realize verbal affixes in German. The aim of this study is to explore if German hearing-impaired children have problems in producing and/or acquiring inflectional suffixes expressed by such phonemes. The findings of two experiments (an elicitation task and a picture-naming task) conducted with a group of hearing-impaired monolingual German children (age 3-4 years) demonstrate that difficulties in perceiving specific phonemes relate to the avoidance of these same sounds in speech production independent of the grammatical function these phonemes have.
Keywords: Coronal obstruents; inflectional suffixes; language acquisition; morphology; nasals; phoneme production; phoneme reception; sensorineural hearing impairment; syllable structure; verbal agreement.