Quantity of Parental Language in the Home Environments of Hard-of-Hearing 2-Year-Olds

TLDR

The study used automated full‑day audio recordings to compare adult word and conversational turn exposure in hard‑of‑hearing and normal‑hearing 2‑year‑olds, benchmarked against a normative database, and to identify factors influencing individual input differences. Results showed that hard‑of‑hearing and normal‑hearing children received similar adult word and turn exposure, both exceeded normative peers, and within the hard‑of‑hearing group, adult word and conversational exchange quantities correlated with auditory characteristics while conversational exchanges, but not word counts, correlated with receptive language ability.

Abstract

Automated analyses of full-day recordings were used to determine whether young children who are hard-of-hearing (HH) received similar levels of exposure to adult words and conversational interactions as age-matched peers with normal-hearing (NH). Differences in adult input between children in this study and in a normative database were considered. Finally, factors were examined that may have contributed to individual differences in the input characteristics of families. Results indicated that the NH and HH groups were exposed to similar numbers of adult words and conversational turns. However, both the NH and HH groups were exposed to more adult words and engaged in more conversational turns than the NH children in the normative sample. Considering only the HH group, both quantity of adult words and conversational exchanges were correlated with children's auditory characteristics. Children's receptive language ability was correlated with conversational exchanges but not with adult word counts.