第十八屆 聽損兒童中文識字能力之研究

聽損兒童中文識字能力之研究

Chinese Word Recognition in Children with Hearing Loss

詹益智¹*、楊又臻¹、李雅蓉¹、洪右真¹

Yi-Chih Chan^1* ,You-Jhen Yang¹,Ya-Jung Lee¹,Yu-Chen Hung¹ 

¹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, Taipei, Taiwan

Background and Purpose: For children with typical hearing, word recognition has been shown to constitute an essential component of reading comprehension and serve as an important index for diagnosis of dyslexia; however, relatively little known is the development of word recognition in school-age children with hearing loss (HL), especially those who are enrolled in auditory habilitation program in preschool age. To understand the possible impact of early intervention on word-recognition skills, the present study examined the performance of school-age children with HL on word recognition after they have received early intervention for a period of time.

Methods: A total of 19 Chinese-speaking children with HL recruited from Children’s Hearing Foundation, Taiwan participated in this study. They were all enrolled in auditory-verbal therapy (AVT) with an average duration of 76.79 months (SD = 24.19). Based on the grade levels, all participants were divided into three groups: Grade 1 (6 children; mean age = 84.83 months, SD = 2.99), Grade 2 (7 children; mean age = 98.00 months, SD = 3.83) and Grade 3-4 (6 children; mean age =116.00 months, SD = 7.04). Children’s word recognition ability was gauged with two standardized measures: Assessment of Chinese Character Lists for Graders (Hung, Wang, Chang, Chen, & Chen, 2014), which required the child to write down the pronunciation for each test character using the Mandarin Phonetic Alphabet Symbols (known as Zhuyin Fuhao) and then make a word using the test character, and Assessment of Sight-word Reading and Fluency (Hung, Wang, Chang, Chen, & Chen, 2015), which required the child to read a series of familiar characters as fast and accurately as possible. The Wilcoxon signed-rank test was employed to compare HL children’s performances on the two tests against the scores at the 50^th percentile of the national norms established for hearing children (i.e., the average scores of the hearing peers).

Results: The results revealed that the character size of the three HL groups did not significantly differ from that of their average hearing peers (z = -1.15 ~ -.34, all ps > .05). For the sight-word reading speed, while Grades 1 and 2 HL children read significantly faster (measured as the number of correctly-read characters per minute) than their average hearing peers (z = -2.01 ~ -1.99, p < .05), Grade 3-4 HL children read just as fast as their average hearing peers (z = -1.57, p > .05 ).

Conclusions: Unlike previous studies indicating that HL children usually lag behind their hearing peers in reading development, the present study showed that after receiving AVT, HL children might perform not only equally well in character size but even better in sight-word reading speed when compared to their average hearing peers. These results suggest that AVT, though emphasizing the oral and listening training, may extend its effect to HL children’s reading and writing development as well. Possible reasons for the present findings and their educational implications for HL children will be discussed in the presentation.

Keywords: word recognition, character size, sight-word reading, Chinese, hearing loss