Comparing some Pragmatic Skills of Hearing Loss Using Cochlear Implant Children to Hearing Children

This project aimed to compare the pragmatic skills of initiation and applying the context of situation across two groups of participants: children with hearing loss and using cochlear implants, and hearing children. Pragmatics is the study of speaker’s intended meanings and hearer’s interpretations in the context of situation. In this research, communicative competence as an ability for properly using language in different social situations was studied. This study was a cross-sectional and quantitative one in which two groups of participants were selected by snowball sampling. Each group comprised 15 Turkish-Persian bilinguals aged 5 to 8 years. Data collection instrument was the Persian version of Bishop's Children's Communication Checklist, validated in Iran. Data were analyzed by t-test. No significant difference was observed between groups in initiation, but the difference was significant in their use of context. Children with hearing loss and using cochlear implants perform poorer than their normally hearing counterparts in some pragmatic skills, but they perform much better that children with profound hearing loss.