Early Development of Children with Hearing Loss

描述(申请人提供)：这项研究项目的目标是调查听力损失(HL)儿童，其父母希望他们在没有手语翻译的情况下被纳入主流，他们在小学早期的表现如何。为此，从幼儿园到四年级的HL儿童将接受各种测试，以评估心理社会发展、认知、口语感知和产生、阅读和写作。结果将与从听力正常儿童(NH)收集的数据进行比较，作为同一方案的一部分。所有接受测试的儿童都参加了这个项目的第一个周期，因此在一岁到四岁之间进行了评估。在所有依赖语言的测试中，HL儿童的平均水平大约比他们早年典型的发展中的NH同龄人的平均水平低一个标准差，这使得他们在进入小学时处于不利地位。下一个周期的主要重点是检查这些儿童在进入主流教育环境时的表现，因为在主流教育环境中，语言需求预计会升级。失聪儿童的语言能力与课堂的语言要求之间的不匹配将越来越严重，导致失聪儿童在学业上逐渐落后。本项目的四个具体目标是：(1)跟踪119名儿童从四年级到四年级的言语、语言、心理社会、认知和学业发展；(2)检验一种假设，即配戴者由于两种设备传递的信号种类不同，存在与HA佩戴者不同的语言加工问题；(3)检验加工限制假说与结构缺陷假说在多大程度上最能描述HL儿童的缺陷模式；以及(4)检验一种假设，即HL儿童的表现从典型的NH儿童发展到根据现有文献对阅读障碍儿童的预期表现不等。这个项目具有独特的动机，既是因为数据将从一岁起接受测试的儿童收集，也是因为依赖测量的选择是根据首席调查员的其他研究得出的结果而产生的。 与公共卫生相关：最近的技术进步极大地改善了感音神经性听力损失儿童的前景，使这些儿童中的许多人有可能在正规学校接受教育。矛盾的是，正是这种向主流的转变削弱了我们跟踪他们因这些技术而做得如何的能力。在这个项目中，我们将跟踪调查以前在学龄前几年被跟踪的有听力损失和没有听力损失的儿童的早期小学年级。这些数据将揭示学龄前儿童在学龄前阶段采取了哪些干预策略，使他们能够很好地适应正规学校的语言需求，以及在学年期间应该提供哪些服务，以促进语言和学业上的成功。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goal of this research project is to examine how children with hearing loss (HL) whose parents wish for them to be mainstreamed without a sign-language interpreter are faring in the early elementary grades. For that purpose, children with HL will be tested from kindergarten through grade four on a variety of measures evaluating psychosocial development, cognition, spoken language perception and production, reading, and writing. Results will be compared to data collected from children with normal hearing (NH) tested as part of the same protocol. All children to be tested participated in the first cycle of this project, and so were evaluated between the ages of one and four years. On all dependent language measures, means for children with HL were roughly one standard deviation below means for their typically developing peers with NH in those early years, leaving them at a disadvantage going into elementary school. The primary focus of this next cycle is to examine how these children do when they enter mainstream educational settings where language demands are expected to escalate. An increasing mismatch between the language abilities of the deaf children and the language requirements of the classroom are predicted, such that deaf children fall progressively behind academically. The four specific aims of this project are: (1) To track the speech, language, psychosocial, cognitive, and academic development of 119 children who participated in the first cycle of this project through fourth grade; (2) To test the hypothesis that CI wearers have linguistic processing problems different from those of HA wearers because of the difference in the kind of signal delivered by the two devices; (3) To examine the extent to which the pattern of deficits exhibited by children with HL is best described by the processing limitations hypothesis versus the structural deficits hypothesis; and (4) To test the hypothesis that the performance of children with HL ranges from what is measured in typically developing children with NH to what would be expected of dyslexic children with NH based on the extant literature. This project is uniquely motivated both because data will be collected from children tested from one year of age and because the selection of dependent measures arises from results emerging from the Principal Investigator's other research. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Recent technological advances have greatly improved prospects for children with sensorineural hearing loss, making it possible for many of these children to be educated in regular schools. Paradoxically it is precisely that shift to the mainstream that has diminished our ability to keep track of how they are doing as a result of these technologies. In this project we will follow through the early elementary grades children with and without hearing loss who were previously followed during the preschool years. These data will shed light both on what intervention strategies in the preschool years prepared children well for the language demands of regular school, and what services should be provided during the school years to facilitate language and academic success.