Thirty children with hearing loss (HL) and 129 typically developing (TD) children
representing comparable ages, vocabulary ability, or phonology skills named pictures
while attempting to ignore semantically related or unrelated auditory distractors.
The timing relation between the onsets of the distractors and pictures varied. A significant
semantic interference effect, that is, slowed naming in the presence of the semantically
related distractor, was observed in all groups, suggesting similar categorical knowledge
in the HL and TD groups. The time course of semantic interference, however, was protracted
in some children with HL, primarily those with unusually slow baseline naming speeds
and early ages of identification/amplification of the loss. Thus, children with HL
seem to develop normal lexical semantic representations. At the same time, the dynamics
of semantic processing appear to be altered by the presence of early childhood HL.
Key Words
Childhood hearing loss - children - language processing - picture-word task - semantic
interference
