第22屆 輕度至中度華語聽障兒童之形態句法發展

輕度至中度華語聽障兒童之形態句法發展

Morphosyntactic Development in Chinese-speaking Children with Mild-to-Moderate Hearing Loss

詹益智^1*  朱家瑩¹  陳潔安¹  柯廷樺¹  蔡宜欣¹  王璽鈞¹  陳姵樺¹

Yi-Chih Chan¹  Chia-Ying Chu¹  Chieh-An Chen¹  Ting-Hua Ke¹  Yi-Shin Tsai¹ Xi-Jun Wang¹  Pei-Hua Chen¹

¹財團法人雅文兒童聽語文教基金會聽語科學研究中心

¹Speech and Hearing Science Research Institute, Children’s Hearing Foundation,

Taiwan

Background and purpose. One linguistic domain that is necessary and essential for the success in language development is morphosyntax, which can be indexed by a child’s mean length of utterance (MLU). MLU is calculated using the formula: the number of words divided by the number of utterances. Although there is research showing that English-speaking children with severe to profound HL usually produce shorter MLU than their hearing peers (Tomblin et al., 2015), relatively little known is about the morphosyntactic development in children with mild-to-moderate HL. In addition, Elfenbein, Hardin-Jones and Davis (1994) has indicated that the voiceless nature of some English inflectional morphemes (e.g, plural –s) makes it difficult for children with HL to develop morphosyntactic ability. By contrast, Chinese has no inflectional morphemes and represents morphemes with audible syllables (Fang, 2009); thus, whether Chinese-speaking children with HL display morphosyntactic delay as do English-speaking children with HL becomes an intriguing issue. Besides, it has been observed that children with HL develop vocabulary at a slower rate (Pitt, 2008). Whether this slow rate of vocabulary development in children with HL adversely affects their growth of the morphosyntactic ability also becomes an important topic to explore. However, there are virtually no studies that explore the morphosyntactic development in Chinese-speaking children with mild-to-moderate HL, which serves the goal of the present study. Methods. Two groups of Chinese-speaking children (four children with HL, mean age = 34 months, sd = 0.82; four children with NH, mean age = 32 months, sd = 3.46) participated in this study. They did not significantly differ in age (U = 4.00, p > .05). The children with HL had mild-to-moderate HL in their better unaided ear. Prior to this study, children with HL had been bilaterally fitted with hearing aids for a mean of 28 months (sd = 2.16) and enrolled in the auditory-verbal therapy in Taiwan for a mean of 22.3 months (sd = 1.70). These children’s daily conversations with their parents were audio-recorded for 1.5 hours at two time points, with a 3-month period in between. Their spontaneous language samples were transcribed, and each utterance was segmented into words using the Chinese word segmentation system (Ma & Chen, 2004) and manually corrected based on the word-segmentation principle stipulated in Taiwan Corpus of Child Mandarin (Cheung, Chang, Ke, & Tsai, 2011). The transcripts followed the CHAT format, and the analyzed using the CLAN program (McWhinney, 2018) for MLU. Results. The results showed that children with HL performed equally well on their MLU at Time 1 (NH = 2.80; HL = 3.36; U = 5.00, p > .05) and Time 2 (NH = 3.15; HL = 3.58; U = 2.00, p > .05). Concerning the growth in MLU, the slope of MLU between the two time points was similar (NH = 0.17; HL = 0.11; U = 7.00, p > .05), revealing that the MLU of both groups of child progressed at a similar pace during the given time period. Discussion and Conclusions. The findings were not consistent with previous ones on English-speaking children in that Chinese-speaking children with HL in this study showed a similar developmental course of MLU as their hearing peers. One possibility is that unlike English, where voiceless inflectional morphemes abound, all Chinese morphemes are syllables which are more audible than English voiceless morphemes. These audibility of the voiced morphemes in Chinese may not prevent children with mild-to-moderate HL from developing the morphosyntactic ability commensurate with their hearing peers; therefore, both groups of children did not differ in their MLU. The other possibility was that the children with HL in the present study only had mild-to-moderate HL. In this scenario, the morphosyntactic ability of children with HL who were appropriately amplified could be as stable and intact as that of their hearing counterparts, resulting in a similar length and growth rate of MLU in both groups. In conclusion, the present study highlights our understanding of the morphosyntactic development in Chinese-speaking children with HL.

Keywords: hearing loss, morphosyntactic development, MLU

Reference

Cheung, H.-T., Chang, J.-R., Ke, H.-W., & Tsai, J. (2011). The development of Taiwan corpus of child Mandarin. (NSC96-2420-H-002-030).

Elfenbein JL, Hardin-Jones MA, Davis JM. (1994). Oral communication skills of children who are hard of hearing. Journal of Speech & Hearing Research, 37, 216–226.

Fang, J. (2009). A discussion on morphemes, words and wordhoods in modern Chinese and their implications on L2 Chinese teaching. Unpublished master’s thesis: National Taiwan Normal University.

Koehlinger, K. M., Van Horne, A. J. O., & Moeller, M. P. (2013). Grammatical outcomes of 3-and 6-year-old children who are hard of hearing. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 56(5), 1701-1714.

Ma, W.-Y. & Chen, K.-J. (2004). Design of CKIP Chinese word segmentation system. International Journal of Asian Language Processing, 19(1), 83-96.

MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk. 3rd edition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Tomblin, J. B., Harrison, M., Ambrose, S. E., Walker, E. A., Oleson, J. J., & Moeller, M. P. (2015). Language Outcomes in Young Children with Mild to Severe Hearing Loss. Ear and Hearing, 36, 76S–91S.