LINGUISTIC DIFFERENCES BETWEEN CHILDREN WITH HEARING LOSS AND LISTENERS

The purpose of this study is to analyse and compare in relation to the listeners or non-deaf people the linguistic level that obtain the children with prelingual hearing loss higher than 70 dB and who have been benefitted of an early prosthesis fitting. For that, it was worked with 15 children from ages between 6 and 11 years old with an age average of 8 years and 8 months old who were distributed into two groups: one formed by 8 severe or deep prelingual deaf children and another constituted by 7 normal-hearing children. The skills assessed were receptive lexicon, oral grammar comprehension and verbal cognitive ability. The results showed it does not exist a significative difference in the manipulative and verbal cognitive abilities on respect to the listeners. However, it does exist differences in the vocabulary capacity level and the oral grammar comprehension. The results confirm that early prothesis fitting provide benefits in linguistic skills, although these benefits are limited compared with normal-hearing.