Language processing in children with cochlear implants: A preliminary report on lexical access for production and comprehension

Abstract

In this plenary paper, we present a review of language research in children with cochlear implants along with an outline of a 5-year project designed to examine the lexical access for production and recognition. The project will use auditory priming, picture naming with auditory or visual interfering stimuli (Picture–Word Interference and Picture–Picture Interference, respectively) and eye tracking paradigms to examine the roles of semantic and various phonological factors. Preliminary data are presented from auditory priming, picture–word interference and picture–picture interference tasks. The emergence of group difference is briefly discussed.

Keywords:

• lexical access
• spoken word recognition
• children
• cochlear implants
• language processing

Acknowledgments

We thank the children who participated and their families. We also thank Dr. Ronald Hoffman; the Children's Hearing Institute and our summer interns Julie Winer, Loren Cohen, Jessica Schanker, and Alexandra Lewisohn for their support and assistance. A special thanks is owed to Dr. Jane Madell who initially brought the first author to NYEEI.

Declaration of Interest: This article and the work reported were supported by a grant from the NIH, National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, 5R01DC011041. The research was conducted at the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary and was presented as a plenary talk by the first author at the 2012 International Association of Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association. The authors have no conflict of interest.