Language Outcomes in Children Who Are Deaf and Hard of Hearing: The Role of Language Ability Before Hearing Aid Intervention
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose: Early auditory experiences are fundamental in infant language acquisition. Research consistently demonstrates the benefits of early intervention (i.e., hearing aids) to language outcomes in children who are deaf and hard of hearing. The nature of these benefits and their relation with prefitting development are, however, not well understood. Method: This study examined Ontario Infant Hearing Program birth cohorts to explore predictors of performance on the Preschool Language Scale-Fourth Edition at the time of (N = 47) and after (N = 19) initial hearing aid intervention. Results: Regression analyses revealed that, before the hearing aid fitting, severity of hearing loss negatively predicted 19% and 10% of the variance in auditory comprehension and expressive communication, respectively. After hearing aid fitting, children's standard scores on language measures remained stable, but they made significant improvement in their progress values, which represent individual skills acquired on the test, rather than standing relative to same-age peers. Magnitude of change in progress values was predicted by a negative interaction of prefitting language ability and severity of hearing loss for the Auditory Comprehension scale. Conclusions: These findings highlight the importance of considering a child's prefitting language ability in interpreting eventual language outcomes. Possible mechanisms of hearing aid benefit are discussed. Supplemental Materials: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.5538868.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".