| dc.description.abstract | This research investigated the concurrent association between early reading
skills and phonological awareness ( PA ), print knowledge, language, cognitive,
and demographic variables in 101 five-year-old children with prelingual
hearing losses ranging from mild to profound who communicated primarily
via spoken language. All participants were fitted with hearing aids ( n = 71)
or cochlear implants ( n = 30). The participants completed standardized
assessments of PA , receptive vocabulary, letter knowledge, word and nonword
reading, passage comprehension, math reasoning, and nonverbal cognitive
ability. Multiple regressions revealed that PA (assessed using judgments
of similarity based on words’ initial or final sounds) made a significant, independent
contribution to children ’ s early reading ability (for both letters and
words/nonwords) after controlling for variation in receptive vocabulary, nonverbal
cognitive ability, and a range of demographic variables, including gender,
degree of hearing loss, communication mode, type of sensory device, age
at fitting of sensory devices, and level of maternal education. Importantly,
the relationship between PA and reading was specific to reading and did not
generalize to another academic ability, math reasoning. Additional multiple
regressions showed that letter knowledge (names or sounds) was superior in
children whose mothers had undertaken postsecondary education and that
better receptive vocabulary was associated with less severe hearing loss, use
of a cochlear implant, and earlier age at implant switch-on. Earlier fitting of
hearing aids or cochlear implants was not, however, significantly associated
with better PA or reading outcomes in this cohort of children, most of whom
were fitted with sensory devices before 3 years of age. | en_US |
