Lo Ming, Chen Pei-Hua
Speech and Hearing Science Research Institute, Children's Hearing Foundation Taipei, Taiwan.
Front Psychol. 2017 Mar 9;8:357. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00357. eCollection 2017.
Memory processes could account for a significant part of the variance in language performances of hearing-impaired children. However, the circumstance in which the performance of hearing-impaired children can be nearly the same as the performance of hearing children remains relatively little studied. Thus, a group of pre-school children with congenital, bilateral hearing loss and a group of pre-school children with normal hearing were invited to participate in this study. In addition, the hearing-impaired participants were divided into two groups according to their working memory span. A language disorder assessment test for Mandarin-speaking preschoolers was used to measure the outcomes of receptive and expressive language of the two groups of children. The results showed that the high-span group performed as good as the hearing group, while the low-span group showed lower accuracy than the hearing group. A linear mixed-effects analysis showed that not only length of rehabilitation but also the memory span affected the measure of language outcome. Furthermore, the rehabilitation length positively correlated with the measure of expressive language only among the participants of the high-span group. The pattern of the results indicates that working memory capacity is one of the factors that could support the children to acquire age-equivalent language skills.
记忆过程可能在很大程度上解释了听力受损儿童语言表现的差异。然而，听力受损儿童的表现与听力正常儿童的表现几乎相同的情况仍相对较少受到研究。因此，一组先天性双侧听力损失的学龄前儿童和一组听力正常的学龄前儿童被邀请参与本研究。此外，听力受损参与者根据其工作记忆广度被分为两组。一项针对说普通话学龄前儿童的语言障碍评估测试被用于测量两组儿童的接受性和表达性语言结果。结果显示，高广度组的表现与听力正常组一样好，而低广度组的准确性低于听力正常组。线性混合效应分析表明，不仅康复时长，而且记忆广度都会影响语言结果的测量。此外，仅在高广度组的参与者中，康复时长与表达性语言的测量呈正相关。结果模式表明，工作记忆能力是能够支持儿童获得与年龄相称的语言技能的因素之一。
