language development and lexical awareness of bilingual (Azeri -Persian) hard of hearing impaired children

Regarding the impact of hearing loss on language development and metalinguistic skill and being language development different from metalinguistic skill in bilingual children, studying of these skills in different bilingual children and comparing them with normal bilingual children can help us understand more about language development in children and the factors involved in it. The present study aims at Investigating and Comparing linguistic and metalinguistic skills of bilingual (Turkish-Persian) children with cochlear implant and their normal hearing peers.

The present follow-up study was conducted on six children with cochlear implant and six normal hearing peers that was randomly selected from preschool students of Zanjan city in the school year of 97-98. We compared these children in Mean Length of Utterance, lexical richness, lexical awareness and syntactic awareness. To investigate language development, continuous speech, and to investigate metalinguistic awareness, lexical awareness (including content and structural analysis of word definition) and syntactic awareness tests was used.

Data analysis revealed that developing language and metalinguistic skills in bilingual preschool children with hearing loss in Turkish-Persian were delayed. (P <0.05). But in Persian language, of the indices of language growth, only the Mean Length of utterance (mean number of morphemes per word) is delayed (P <0.05). There was no significant difference in any of the content and structural aspects of word definition in hearing loss children (P>0.05).  The low ability level of subjects’ in metalinguistic skills in Turkish language can be ascribed to the formal teaching of Persian in schools. In addition, Spearman's correlation coefficient indicated that there is a positive and significant correlation between indices of language growth, lexical awareness of bilingual (Turkish-Persian) children with hearing loss and normal hearing peers in both Persian and Turkish.