Agrammatism in Children with Hearing Impairment

Abstract

In the realm of speech and language production, children with hearing loss produce ungrammatical sentences and have difficulties" in the acquisition of syntactic structures which gives the impression of agrammatic kind of speech. The study attempted to account for agrammatism in Malayalam speaking children with hearing impairment using the Index of Productive Syntax (/PSyn) (Scarborough, 1990). The natural speech samples of thirty children with normal hearing were compared with thirty children with hearing impairment and analyzed using the Index of Productive Syntax. Malayalam Language Test (MLT} (Rukmini, 1994) was used for assessing the language age of the participants. Correlation between MLT and IPSyn scores was checked. The results revealed comparatively better scores for children with normal hearing for some of the items in IPSyn. Also a positive correlation was noticed between the two syntactic assessment tools, MLT and IPSyn. The test results lead to the conclusion that there are some missing grammatical structures in speech and an overall delay in the performance of children with hearing impairment in comparison to the language age matched normally hearing children revealing the presence of agrammatism.