Spoken and written language assessment of orally trained children with hearing loss: Syntactic structures and deviations

The present study reports the results of a language assessment procedure for the examination of spontaneous spoken and written language samples of orally trained children with hearing loss. Participants were nine male and four female students with hearing loss who were mainstreamed in integrated classrooms in two regular elementary schools in Israel. Four male and five female average-achieving students with normal hearing served as a control group for testing the assessment procedure. The results revealed significant differences between the spoken and written language samples of the children with hearing loss. Differences were recorded with respect to the variety of correct syntactic structures as well as to the amount of the syntactic and morpho-syntactic errors that were recorded. The range of syntactic structures that were used in the spoken samples was much greater than in the written samples. In the group of children with normal hearing, similarity in language productions across modalities was recorded. Group comparisons revealed that students with normal hearing exhibited quantitative and qualitative syntactic superiority over the students with hearing loss; we argue that in order to fully understand language development in children with hearing loss it is mandatory to evaluate language productions in both the spoken and the written modalities.