Early Lexical Development of Children with Cochlear Implants

Vocabulary size and grammatical composition in 11 children who received a cochlear implant at a mean age of 15 months were compared to that of the Quebec French normative sample for the Words and Sentences questionnaire of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MBCDI). Results showed that, as age increases in children, age equivalent scores according to total vocabulary size approach hearing age (equivalent to the duration of device use) and diverge from chronological age. Distribution of grammatical categories according to vocabulary size followed the same pattern as in the normative sample. These results suggest that the lexical profile of children with implants was very similar to that of normally-hearing children who had the same number of words.