Literacy, Auditory Memory, and Perception of Prosody in Children With Cochlear Implants
Open AccessVariability in literacy outcomes in children with cochlear implants (CIs) has yet to be fully explained. Existing studies have looked into various cognitive factors that impact literacy development in children with CIs, including cognitive factors as well as auditory-perceptual factors such as the perception of prosodic characteristics of speech. However, links between these factors remain unclear. Based on the existing literature, auditory memory may play an important role in the development of literacy skills in children with CIs and it may be influential in the process of coding the acoustic properties of speech for language and literacy development. The present study had three goals: 1) to describe the relevant variables (i.e., literacy, cognitive ability, language, phonological skills, and auditory skills) in children with CIs, 2) to characterize the relationship between auditory memory and literacy in children with CIs, and 3) to characterize the relationship between auditory memory and perception of prosody in children with CIs. There were 5 subjects included in this study. All were children between the ages of 7 and 12 with at least one cochlear implant received prior to 3 years of age. This study was conducted completely online due to the COVID-19 pandemic and measures were taken to ensure the standardization and validity of the measures used. The subjects performed comparably well on tests of speech recognition, early literacy skills, and cognitive ability tests, with some variability in auditory memory. Literacy measures were mostly within normal limits; however, most of the participants performed more poorly on the reading comprehension subtest than the other tests of reading. There was significant variability in scores on the tests of perception of prosody. Auditory memory was related to language as well as certain literacy measures; however, it was not related to the reading comprehension measure. This reading comprehension measure was also not related to language, though language was related to the other reading measures. Auditory memory was also related to the tests of prosody perception. These results suggest that auditory memory does play a role in the development of literacy skills in children with CIs. Auditory memory may be linked to literacy through the coding of prosodic characteristics of speech, which aids in the development of early literacy skills. However, there may be other factors involved in the development of more complex literacy skills involved in reading comprehension. Future research should explore these factors on a larger scale.
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