Word acquisition in children with cochlear implants

PURPOSE:to analyze word acquisition in early oral language development of a group of children with cochlear implants.METHODS:this consisted on a clinical, prospective and longitudinal study. Five mothers of children with cochlear implants participated. The mothers reported the words that were spontaneously produced by their children. The Language Development Survey adapted to Brazilian Portuguese was administered once a month, totaling six moments per child. The paired t-test was used on the longitudinal data analysis.RESULTS:the mean number of words spontaneously produced by the group of children gradually increased from the first to the sixth month: 38 to 58.8 words. There were significant differences in the number of words produced on Moment 1 and Moment 5 (p = 0.016) and between Moment 1 and Moment 6 (p = 0.010). The categories with the greatest number of words produced by children were other, people, modifiers and actions. The categories with the greatest increase were modifiers, body parts and other.CONCLUSIONS:the group of children with cochlear implants showed a gradual increase in the number of words spontaneously (mainly other, modifiers, people and actions) produced over a period of six months, being significant after the fifth month of Speech-Language therapy. The number of words produced increased with higher significance with longer intervention periods. It is suggested that Speech-Language Pathologists apply the formulary on a six-month interval as this is an ideal period to evidence lexical acquisition.