| Hearing loss is the most common physical disorder in newborns, resulting in deficits in verbal language acquisition for thousands of children. Because over 90% of children born with a hearing loss are born to parents with normal hearing, many parents express a desire for their child to develop fluent and intelligible speech and language skills. Cochlear implant technology has provided many children with profound hearing loss the opportunity to achieve verbal fluency commensurate with same-aged hearing peers. However, variability in speech, language, and academic proficiency among cochlear implant recipients continues to be reported, and is motivation for focused research to identify performance characteristics across several curriculum measures. The purpose of the current study was to assess the performance level of second and third grade cochlear implant recipients in expressive, receptive, and written language, and mathematic and reading achievement and compare their performance with normative data from same-aged, normal-hearing peers. A second aspect of this study involved calculating Person product-moment correlation coefficients to examine potential interrelationships among the criterion measures for the current study group. Results from the current study group showed no significant difference in performance for 8 of 11 criterion measures as compared to same-aged hearing peers. The correlations between measures were statistically significant for 53 of 55 coefficients. These findings may provide support for efforts to further explore educational programming that optimizes learning needs that may be unique to children with profound hearing loss who use a cochlear implant. |
