What are the important factors that contribute to
reading and
academic achievement
in children who are deaf and who use CIs?
At the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, an NIH-funded, longitudinal study has tracked listening, speaking, language, literacy and even academic skills in the first cohort of prelingually deaf children to grow up using cochlear implants. The children in this cohort were products of the public education system that utilized a total communication approach.
This talk will recap some of the studies we have done to investigate the relationship between language and literacy (i.e., reading and writing) skills in pediatric cochlear implant users. We have found that this cohort of CI users compare favorably to their hearing peers on standardized tests that assess language, literacy, and overall academic achievement. Additionally, although there was a wide distribution of educational and vocational outcomes, the children tended to follow the educational/vocational patterns of their parents. Subsequent cohorts were tested on skills that are thought to be predictive and associated with literacy such as phonological processing. Results revealed that it is possible to obtain a valid measure of phonological processing skills in prelingually, profoundly deaf children who wear CIs. While the CI children were able to complete tasks measuring phonological processing, there were performance differences between the age-matched children with CIs and their hearing counter-parts. The process of learning phonological awareness for the children with CIs was characterized by a longer, more protracted learning phase than their hearing counterparts. Tests of phonological memory skills indicated that when the tasks controlled for presentation method and response modality, there were no differences between the performance of children with CIs and their hearing counterparts. Tests of rapid naming revealed that there were no differences between rapid letter and rapid number naming between the two groups.
A peripheral objective of this talk is to use these findings to identify the skills in these children that are in need of remediation and subsequently to generate suggestions for improving the techniques we use in the educational process for these children.