Word Identification &Memory in Children with CIs

Cuny Graduate Sch And Univ Ctr, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Short-term phonological working memory will be studied in children ages 7-12 yrs who received a cochlear implant before age 7 and who have 1.5+ yrs of Cl experience. Normal-hearing children are studied for comparison. Exp. 1 examines how words and phonemes that are perceptually similar to a presented word are also activated in memory during identification. Using a priming task, we compare how quickly a target word is repeated when the preceding prime word was either phonologically identical, a rhyming word, or phonologically unrelated. Exp. 2 examines how working memory load impacts word identification. A word span task is used to determine if recall errors result mainly from identification errors, or if difficulties arise after encoding. Exp. 3 studies explicit judgments of phonological similarity using a same/different word task and a rhyme detection task. In addition to speed and accuracy measures, we examine for the normal hearing children, an ERP measure of phonological comparison processes. For each experiment, a pretest will be used to select recorded test words that each child is able to identify in isolation. Only these items will be used in the main tasks. New insights into the development of language processing skills may be gained.