Cochlear implanted children: Linguistic outcomes

The present exploratory study aims at exploring expressivelinguistics abilities of cochlear-implanted children by testingspontaneous speech samples. For this purpose, Mean Length of Utterancein words will be measured and the productive use of single grammaticalmorphemes will be analysed. We analysed the spontaneous speechof three deaf Portuguese children with cochlear implants and threenormal-hearing children paired case by case, taking into account thechronological age, gender and parental education. Cochlear-implantedchildren produced on average less than 2 words per utterance than normalhearing children. In morphology, cochlear implanted children from thesample were not capable to produce irregular plural formatives and tomake productive use of inflectional morphemes on main verbs for thesubjunctive and imperative modes. In general, the grammatical progressseems to be slower for cochlear-implanted children when compared totheir hearing peers. Nevertheless, an earlier implantation, longer implantuse and a bilateral implantation seem to bring benefits for the child’sspoken language.Keywords: cochlear implants, language, grammar.