Aspectos morfosintácticos en muestras de lenguaje espontáneo de niños hipoacúsicos con implante coclear

Laburpena

Within the study of language development, it is especially stimulating to focus attention on cases in which development is associated with motor or sensory deficits. This is the case of hearing impaired children, and more specifically those who benefit from functional hearing through the cochlear implant (IC). During the last years, numerous works have been evidencing the improvements in these children in all phases of prelinguistic and linguistic development. However, at the same time at least two aspects have been observed where the children implanted as a group seemed not to match the listeners. The first is the variability of the results: while some children seem to compensate for the delay after four or five years with the implant, others seem to maintain the delay indefinitely. The second is that there are linguistic areas where development tends to be atypical. Our main research objective is to demonstrate that there are significant differences in the linguistic and morphosyntactic development of hearing impaired children with cochlear implants. On the other hand, our secondary objective will be to demonstrate the interval observed in the group of implanted hearing impaired children with respect to the group of normal hearing children. For this, in this thesis we study the morphological level and the spontaneous speech of this population at 36 months of auditory age in contrast to a group of children without linguistic deficits of the same auditory age. We will focus on the use of some specific markers that account for a linguistic domain in this area: the use of conjunctions, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, pronouns and determinants. On the other hand, we carry out an analysis that transcends the morphological categories. We want to project a type of exploratory research that draws on both levels and also reflects in a general way the communicative capacity of the study group that is the object of our interest: children with hearing loss with cochlear implants. And it is that communicative effects is what really interests us, since language is, above all, a communication system. From a methodological point of view, we have carried out an initial theoretical review and a later empirical analysis. The analysis is carried out from a qualitative approach and applying parametric statistical methods. In addition, we have used specific software for the labeling and processing of children's linguistic samples (CLAN). After the analysis of the linguistic samples of children's speech we observe that, in effect, the interindividual difference is the most noticeable characteristic of the subjects that make up the group of implanted children, while the general development of morphological aspects in absolute terms will be very similar. in the two groups of participants. Thus, with respect to the initial hypotheses of the investigation, we see that there are indeed differences in language acquisition in the group of implanted children, although they are less marked than we initially imagined.