Early Expressive Vocabulary Development of Korean Children with Hearing Impairment

Park, Hye Jin; Pae, Soyeong

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Commun Sci Disord. 2003;8(1): 66-81.

Hye Jin Park^` , and Soyeong Pae^`

박혜진(Hye Jin Park)| 배소영(Soyeong Pae)

ABSTRACT

The purpose of the study was to investigate the development of expressive vocabulary of various lexical categories of Korean children with hearing impairment. The results were compared with the developmental patterns obtained from the children with normal hearing. Furthermore, the current study examined the correlation between vocabulary development and the various factors that could influence the vocabulary development of children with hearing impairment. One hundred and twenty-four children with severe or profound hearing loss participated in this study. They were 19- to 60-month-olds who had hearing parents with no no additional disabling conditions. Their backgrounds differed from each other in various aspects: the age at which hearing loss was diagnosed, the degree of hearing loss, the length of period of using hearing aids or cochlear implant, and the length of language intervention. The subjects’ expressive vocabulary levels were documented using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory-Korean(MCDI-K). The results of the study were as follows. In general, the vocabulary score of children with hearing impairment was lower than that of age-matched peers with normal hearing, indicating delayed vocabulary development in children with hearing impairment. Within the subject group, there were noticeable individual differences even among the children of the same age, and these differences increased progressively in older age groups. The pattern of vocabulary development did not differ between the children with hearing impairment and children with normal hearing. However, children with hearing impairment showed a higher ratio of nouns and a lower ratio of verbs in their vocabulary when compared to normal children. The acquisition of closed class words of the hearing-impaired, such as grammatical morphemes and conjunctions, was also delayed compared to that of the children with normal hearing.