Abstract

The study group consisted of 30 children with cochlear implants (CI) and 30 children with normal hearing (NH), whose ages were 4 years and 7 years 11 months. Turkish Test of Early Language Development (TEDIL) was used to assess the language skills of the children. Language samples were gathered by using Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument (ENNI). The study results indicated that the sum of receptive, expressive and verbal language scores of the children with CI was lower than the children with NH and the difference was statistically significant according to TEDIL. It was found that mean length of utterance (MLU) and number of different words (NDW) averages among MLU, NDW and total number of words (TNW) average scores showed statistically significant differences in all of the three stories in favour of the children with NH. However, there was no statistically significant difference between two groups except for the A1 story in TNW. It was found that children with CI used case suffixes, pronouns, conjunctions among part of speech and verbals which were necessary for creating complex sentences less often than the children with NH and the difference between them was statistically significant with regard to the occurrence frequency of case suffixes, pronouns, A1 and A3 stories, A1 story conjunction. Besides, it was observed that the children with CI made more statistically significant word omission, morpheme omission and substitution errors than the children with NH. It was found that the children who were implanted before the age of 2 scored higher. As a result of language sample evaluations, it was stated that TNW scores predicted the ones with CI and MLU and NDW scores predicted the children with NH.

Key word: Deaf and hard of hearing, cochlear implant, narrative, language assessment.