Venturing beyond the sentence level: Narrative skills in children with hearing loss

This study explores the differences in oral narrative skills between school-age children with mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss (HL) and children who have typical hearing and language development. Narrative samples were collected following a picture-elicited storytelling task. Language samples were transcribed and coded for a number of measures, including narrative content, syntax, and grammar as well as amount of relevant information shared with the listener. Results indicated that the most vulnerable aspect of narration in children with HL is sharing information that is relevant for the task and context. Children with a sensorineural HL diagnosed during their preschool years are at risk for poorer development of higher level language skills, such as narrative production, compared with same-age peers.