The Relation between Vocabulary Knowledge and Phonological Awareness in Children with Cochlear Implants

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the relation between lexical knowledge and phonological awareness performance of children with cochlear implants. Method: Thirty children with cochlear implants (aged 5-7 years), 30 children with normal hearing matched for age, and 30 children with normal hearing matched for vocabulary size participated in the study. Children completed a vocabulary knowledge measure and three phonological awareness tasks with words that had high and low neighborhood density. Results: Children with cochlear implants performed more poorly than their age-matched peers and similarly to their vocabulary-matched peers on phonological awareness tasks. When performance was analyzed according to the neighborhood density of the target word, children with cochlear implants and age-matched children performed better with high-density words. Across all groups, vocabulary size correlated significantly with phonological awareness performance. Conclusion: Children with cochlear implants demonstrate delays in both vocabulary knowledge and phonological awareness performance, but children with cochlear implants appear to take advantage of lexical information similarly to their age-matched peers.