Effects of a word-learning training on children with cochlear implants

Findings

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Evidence Tier rating based solely on this study. This intervention may achieve a higher tier when combined with the full body of evidence.

Study Details

Setting

The study was conducted at one full-time auditory–oral preschool for children with hearing loss, where students received speech-language therapy and used cochlear implants to learn spoken English.

Study sample

This review focuses on four of the five students who participated in the study, who ranged in age from 3 to 5 years old. All four students had a diagnosis of congenital severe to profound bilateral hearing loss and low linguistic knowledge, as assessed by a language assessment battery at the start of the study. None of the students had a cognitive or language development diagnosis or any documented visual impairment, and they were all able to select objects. One student was exposed to Spanish at home, while the other three were not. One additional student, Participant 3, was included in the study, but is not part of the subset whose data meets WWC standards.

Intervention Group

The intervention consisted of a word-learning training delivered individually to each child twice per week for 10 weeks, with each session lasting about 20 minutes. In each week, the investigator used one training set of six unknown words and taught those words through three structured steps designed to support rapid word learning: identification, label repetition, and semantic teaching. During identification, the child saw pictures of three known words and one unknown word and was guided to notice when a label was not known; if the child could not name the unknown picture, the investigator supplied the label. During label repetition, the child used a plastic microphone and practiced repeating each target word after the adult model, with turns alternating between the investigator and child and additional prompts provided if needed. During semantic teaching, the investigator gave a brief factual detail about each pictured item to connect the new word with familiar meaning (for example, describing what kind of object it was). Across a single training session, each unknown word was said at least nine times, and the words trained during intervention were different from the words used in the weekly probe assessments. Sessions were scheduled on either Monday/Wednesday or Tuesday/Thursday, and probe assessments were typically administered on Fridays.

Comparison Group

There is no comparison group in single-case designs. During the baseline condition, no training was provided and students received business-as-usual services in their full-time auditory-oral preschool, where they received 60 min of individual speech-language intervention weekly. Participants remained in baseline until stable baseline was observed.

Support for implementation

The study text suggests that the first author was the study investigator (the first author trained the independent observer for interassessor assessment data collection, and response data was compared between the first author and the observer). The first author is a certified and licensed speech language pathologist who administered the language assessment battery to examine the linguistic profiles of the participants.