Relationship between Use of Communication Strategies and Individual Language Ability of Cochlear Implant Children in Oral Conversation

Abstract

Objectives: Children with cochlear implants (CI) tend to exhibit communication breakdowns more often than normal hearing children during oral conversation. This study was aimed at learning whether use of communication strategies would correlate to the individual language abilities of CI children, so that the findings could be applied to rehabilitation programs.
Methods: Eleven CI children aged from five to eleven years old participated in this study. Each child was requested to carry on a conversation face to face with a clinician for fifteen minutes; the same topics were used with all children. The numbers of communication breakdowns were counted, as well as use of repair strategies categorized into "repetition type," "request type" and "confirmation type." These items were then examined as to their relationships to receptive vocabulary, speech recognition score, expressive syntax, word association, and types using Spearman's rank correlation coefficient.
Results: Significant correlations were found between total use of repair strategies and speech recognition scores (r=0.667, p<0.05), product syntax (r=0.807, p<0.05) and word association (r=0.800, p<0.05). There was a high correlation between use of repetition strategy and confirmation strategy (r=0.686, p<0.05).
Discussion: We conjecture that word association is involved in guessing the conversation partner's meaning during request or confirmation, and that syntax production is involved in conveying said meaning and content. Therefore, there is a need to provide training that promotes word association and syntax production. As repetition strategy was thought to precede confirmation strategy, the study indicated that training is needed that takes into consideration the repair strategy order.