Narrative skills and language comprehension in preschool children with cochlear implants: A comparison with children with Developmental Language Disorder or typical development

Marinella Majorano; Valentina Persici; Michela Santangelo; Rachele Ferrari; Beatrice Bertelli; Elena Florit; Manuela Lavelli; Tamara Bastianello; Letizia Guerzoni; Domenico Cuda

doi:10.1016/j.jcomdis.2024.106424

Narrative skills and language comprehension in preschool children with cochlear implants: A comparison with children with Developmental Language Disorder or typical development

J Commun Disord. 2024 Mar 26:109:106424. doi: 10.1016/j.jcomdis.2024.106424. Online ahead of print.

Affiliations

¹ Department of Human Sciences, University of Verona, Verona, Italy. Electronic address: marinella.majorano@univr.it.
² Department of Human Sciences, University of Verona, Verona, Italy.
³ Evolvendo Clinical Centre, Mantua, Italy.
⁴ Department of Human Sciences, University of Verona, Verona, Italy; Department of Developmental Psychology and Socialisation, University of Padua, Padova, Italy.
⁵ Otorhinolaryngology Unit, Guglielmo da Saliceto Hospital, Piacenza, Italy.

PMID: 38579544
DOI: 10.1016/j.jcomdis.2024.106424

Abstract

Introduction: The narrative skills of children with cochlear implants (CIs) are fragile, but the factors at play and whether these difficulties could be similar to those detected in language impairment are not clear. The present study aims to assess, at the microstructural level, narrative skills, comparing children with CIs with children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) or Typical Development (TD). Furthermore, the relationship between verbal (lexical and morphosyntactic) comprehension and narrative skills across groups is investigated.

Methods: The narratives of 19 children with CIs (M_age = 62.42 months, SD = 6.83), 13 children with DLD (M_age = 65.38 months, SD = 4.27), and 18 preschool children with TD (M_age = 63.67 months, SD = 4.31) were assessed in a standardized task. Articles, prepositions, pronouns, gender and number agreement, accuracy in the use of verbs, and number of arguments in each sentence were analysed. Lexical and morphosyntactic comprehension were also assessed. Performance was compared across groups using ANOVAs or Kruskal-Wallis tests. The role of lexical and morphosyntactic comprehension in predicting each morphological and syntactic element in the narrative task was examined using linear regressions.

Results: Data analysis showed that both children with CIs and DLD had fragilities in narration, both in the morphological and syntactic components. Although some differences between children with CIs and those with DLD emerged in descriptive analyses, these were not statistically significant. Regressions showed that morphosyntactic comprehension predicted the number of pronouns produced only in the TD group.

Conclusions: The scarce differences between CI and DLD groups and the absence of an effect of morphosyntactic comprehension on pronoun production may be due to their low production of these elements in the narrative task and/or to a difficulty in managing pronouns in an expressive task regardless of their ability to comprehend them. Potential implications of these results are discussed.

Keywords: Children; Cochlear implants; Developmental language disorder; Morphosyntactic comprehension; Narrative skills; Typical development.