The perceptual use of semantic rules by normal-hearing and hard-of-hearing children.

This study investigated the effects of varying degrees of linguistic constraint upon the performance of hard-of-hearing subjects in a repetition task. Experimental stimuli consisted of three sets of sentence strings: grammatical, semantically anomalous, and ungrammatical, respectively. While the control group performed essentially equally across all three conditions, the hard-of-hearing group performed best to the grammatical stimuli and worst to the ungrammatical stimuli. It was hypothesized that the hard-of-hearing subjects employed a primitive sentence dictionary, while the normal-hearing subjects had developed a more sophisticated word dictionary.