The Acquisition of Grammatical and Lexical Structures in Children with Cochlear Implants: A Developmental Psycholinguistic Approach

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Abstract
The acquisition of grammatical and lexical structures was studied in a sample of 10 young German-speaking children with cochlear implants (mean implantation age 2 years 3 months). Spontaneous speech samples were collected covering the first 18 months after first tune-up. At the end of this period, 8 children were able to produce two- or multi-word utterances. Furthermore, 8 children had acquired plural inflections on nouns, and 5 children had acquired a substantial portion of verb inflectional morphology. Children did less well acquiring case-marked articles, forms of the copula and modal verbs. Articles were acquired better when they functioned as pronouns. Children had good vocabularies (type/token ratios ≥0.25), and all but one child started language with a preference for content words as opposed to function words.

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