Testing the phonemes relevant for German verb morphology in hard-of-hearing children: The FinKon-test

Abstract

Many hard-of-hearing children show delays or disorders in the acquisition of morphology and syntax. There is an on-going discussion how these difficulties are connected to problems in the auditory domain. The article focuses on coronal consonants that function as suffixes in the German verbal inflectional system. Here we present a new test we developed to evaluate the ability to discriminate these consonants in syllabic offset positions. A pilot study with 22 hearing-impaired (HI) children and 15 typically developing (TD) children reveals significantly lower discrimination scores in the HI group. The results highlight the necessity to measure the capacity to distinguish particular phonemes at specific syllable positions, when considering the impact of a hearing impairment on language acquisition.

Key words::

• Auditory perception
• coronal consonants
• German
• hearing-impairment
• inflectional morphology
• language acquisition
• mild-to-moderate hearing loss
• phonology
• speech audiometry
• test development

Acknowledgements

The research reported in this paper is funded by the German research foundation DFG through grants to Markus Hess and Monika Rothweiler (project number: HE 2869/6-1, RO923/1-1). We are grateful to parents and children, schools and intervention centers in North Rhine-Westphalia, Hamburg, Bremen, Schleswig-Holstein and Berlin. We would like to thank Achim Breitfu and Frank M ller of the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf for their help in preparing and conducting the test and Lena Michalik for the illustrations of the test material.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest.