Measuring Lexical Diversity and Syntactic Complexity after Cochlear Implant in 8-9 Years age Childrens

Although cochlear implantation has been proven to cause considerable improvement in perceptive and expressive language of prelingually severe to profound hearing–impaired children, however, children with cochlear implant have grammar and vocabulary deficits depends on some factors such as diagnosis age, acoustic approval age, hearing age, rehabilitation onset and etc. The purpose of this study was to measure children's lexical diversity and syntactic complexity after cochlear implant in persian speaking children.
This study included 10 children with cochlear implant and 10 age- and gender-matched normal hearing children. In order to collect data, language samples of children were gathered via picture description. The first 50 utterances were analyzed to measure mean lentgh of utterances, number of different words, number of total words and type token ratio. Mean hearing age of participants was 67.7 months (SD=1.77) and we used independent T test for data analysis.
There was no significant difference in all measures between children with cochlear implants and hearing age peers (p>0.05).
Duration of hearing experience after CIs is an important factor for acquiring speech and language abilities. In other words, after 60 to72 months of implant experience, their lexical diversity and syntactic complexity were almost similar to chronological age scores of 60 to 72 months in normal hearing children.