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ABSTRACT
This study aims to compare word spelling outcomes for French-speaking deaf children with a cochlear implant (CI) with hearing children who matched for age, level of education and gender. A picture written naming task controlling for word frequency, word length, and phoneme-to-grapheme predictability was designed to analyze spelling productions. A generalized linear mixed model on the percentage of correct spelling revealed an effect of participant’s reading abilities, but no effect of hearing status. Word frequency and word length, but not phoneme-to-grapheme predictability, contributed to explaining the spelling variance. Deaf children with a CI made significantly less phonologically plausible errors and more phonologically unacceptable errors when compared to their hearing peers. Age at implantation and speech perception scores were related to deaf children’s errors. A good word spelling level can be achieved by deaf children with a CI, who nonetheless use less efficiently the phoneme-to-grapheme strategy than do hearing children.
Acknowledgments
We sincerely thank Michèle Maclean for the precious help with proofreading this paper. We also thank Agathe Naudin-Mercier, Marine Kermogant, and Amélie Hubert for their contribution to testing children. We are grateful to the children who participated in the study as well as their parents, their professors, and their speech-therapists.
Conflict of interestd
The authors declared that there is no conflicts of interest.
Ethics approval
The present study was approved by the ethics committee of the Université Libre de Bruxelles in accordance with the ethical principles of the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki.
Informed consentd
Informed consent was obtained from parents before data collection and children gave their verbal consent.