Language and literacy skills in children with cochlear implants: Past and present findings

The vast majority of children with severe-to-profound hearing loss are born to parents with normal hearing who want their children to grow up with spoken language. Before the availability of cochlear implants, however, that goal was often unattainable, leaving these children to face lifetimes of greatly diminished capabilities. When the first generation of implants became available, dramatic improvements were immediately realized in these children’s abilities to acquire spoken language and literacy: about half of the deaf children who received cochlear implants began demonstrating performance on a variety of language and literacy skills within the typical range, defined as better than one standard deviation below the means of children with normal hearing. But as promising as those early outcomes were, it does not appear that these performance levels have changed proportionately with changes in implant technology. This chapter reviews relevant research using standardized measures of spoken language to examine the veracity of that impression, and describes findings across a wide range of studies that explored the linguistic and cognitive mechanisms underlying those standardized measures.