Syntactic Maturity of Spontaneous Speech and Elicited Imitations of Hearing-Impaired Children

Abstract

Two language measures, designed for normal-hearing children, were applied to a sample of 52 severely and profoundly hearing-impaired children between four and 15 years of age. The Developmental Sentence Analysis (Lee, 1974) was used to assess their spontaneous language and the Carrow Elicited Languate Inventory (Carrow, 1974a) to assess imitated language. The correlation between scores on the two measures was similar to that found by Carrow (1974b) for normal children (r = .75). However, there was little relation between either measure and reading achievement in hearing-imparied children. A subsample of children retested one year later showed those who remained in a school for the deaf showed greater improvement in their ability to imitate while those who had been integrated into school with normal-hearing children improved most in spontaneous language. Over half of the hearing-impaired subjects scored below normal hearing three-year-olds on both measures. Caution is advised, however, in applying these norms to hearing-impaired children. The spontaneous language of these children differed from that of younger hearing children who received similar overall scores in the normative sample. The hearing-impaired subjects tended to use more mature constructions but used fewer correct structures per utterance.

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