English Abstract Thesis

1. Title: Promoting Reading Comprehension in Children with Cochlear Implant
Author: Gabriella Traisci, Speech Therapist - Rome
The aim of the present study is to focus on written text comprehension difficulties by deaf children
with cochlear implant, in order to develop an appropriate rehabilitation process to promote the
development of this competence.
When reading, cognitive and linguistic processes are coincident in fostering comprehension. In the
profound pre-verbal hearing impaired, the degree of delayed language skills affects reading
comprehension. Several studies show that teen-agers with pre-verbal deafness reach a text
comprehension comparable to an average age of about 9 years (Conrad, 1979; Torres & Santana,
2005; Traisci et al., 2010).
This is confirmed by other research studies, noting that these great difficulties have to be ascribed to
poor phonological, spelling, and syntactic skills resulting from deafness. The same studies assessed
also meta-cognitive skills (Leonard P., Kelly, Dragana Barac-Cikoja, 2000; Kelly et al., 2002),
investigating particularly the strategies either spontaneously used by deaf children, or suggested to
them by adults. It has been shown that strategies spontaneously used by deaf children are not
adequate to achieve correct text comprehension, while deaf readers have proved being unable to
monitor their reading comprehension, tending to overestimate their own abilities.
Efficacy of cochlear implants in deaf children has been amply demonstrated (Bond et al. 2009;
Vlastarakos et al., 2010). Many researchers argue that children with cochlear implant tend to
develop better phonological skills and a better representation of verbal memory (Geers et al., 2003;
Schorr E. et al., 2008; Johnson et al., 2010; van der Kant et al., 2010), thus developing
communication and speaking skills that are almost equal to those owned by their hearing peers of
the same age (Houston, 2010; Moog & Geers, 2010; May-Mederake et al., 2010; Schramm B. et al.,
2010; Sie, 2010; Sininger et al., 2010). What still remain crucial factors are a good school
integration process, and the importance of school learning for children with cochlear implant.
The present research applies specific, multi-component rehabilitation process to help deaf children
with fair cognitive and linguistic skills to reach a satisfying level of text comprehension skill, trying
to limit as far as possible their getting behind in this regard.
A group of four Rome-based children has participated to this research. All of them are affected by
deep bilateral neurosensorial hearing impairment, and all have been given a cochlear implant since
the age of 24 months. Two of them have been submitted to a rehabilitation process aimed at
facilitating text comprehension. All children are comparable for many fundamental variables: their
age and kind of hearing impairment, the age the impairment appeared and their age when they
received the implant, the class they are presently in, the kind of school they are enrolled in, and the
level of their speaking skill, specially from the point of view of spoken language comprehension.
The data regarding the hearing, speaking, and text-comprehension skills of this group have been
compared with data of a control group.