Effect of age at cochlear implantation and at exposure to Cued Speech on literacy skills in deaf children.
Early implant helps deaf kids read; tacking on Cued Speech early gives no extra lift.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team tracked 47 deaf children who got cochlear implants.
They asked: does adding Cued Speech early boost reading scores?
Kids were tested in grades 2–5; half had Cued Speech, half did not.
What they found
Earlier implant surgery helped reading a little.
Earlier Cued Speech also helped a little.
But the two boosts did not stack; each worked on its own.
How this fits with other research
Giné et al. (2017) used the same quasi design to check a Catalan support scale.
Their work shows our method is solid for school-age kids.
Luckasson et al. (2017) found no extra visual-processing gap in ASD; like us, they saw small or null add-on effects when groups are matched well.
Why it matters
You can tell families: get the implant early, but don’t expect Cued Speech to double the gain.
Focus your literacy goals on implant timing first; add Cued Speech only if the IEP team wants visual language support.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The aim of this study was to investigate how age at cochlear implantation (CI) and age at exposure to Cued Speech (CS, Manual system that resolves the ambiguity inherent lipreading) could impact literacy skills in deaf children. Ninety deaf children fitted with CI (early vs late) and exposed to CS (early vs late) from primary schools (from Grade 2 to Grade 5) took part in this study. Five literacy skills were assessed: phonological skills through phoneme deletion, reading (decoding and sentence comprehension), word spelling and vocabulary. The results showed that both age at CI and age at first exposure to CS had some influence on literacy skills but there was no interaction between these factors. This implies that the positive effects of age at CI, especially on all literacy skills in the younger children, were not strengthened by age at exposure to CS.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2017 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2017.09.014