Pragmatic language ability refers to the ability to use language in a social context. It has been found to be correlated with success in general education for deaf and hard of hearing children. It is therefore of great importance to study why deaf and hard of hearing children often perform more poorly than their hearing peers on tests measuring pragmatic language ability. In the current study the Pragmatics Profile questionnaire from the CELF-IV battery was used to measure pragmatic language ability in children using cochlear implants (N = 14) and children without a hearing loss (N = 34). No significant difference was found between the children with cochlear implants (CI) and the children without hearing loss (HL) for the sum score of the pragmatics language measure. However, 35.71% of the children with CI performed below age norm, while only 5.89% of the children without HL performed below age norm. In addition, when dividing the sum score into three sub-measures: Rituals and Conversational skills (RCS), Asking for, Giving, and Responding to Information (AGRI), and Nonverbal Communication skills (NCS), significant differences between the groups were found for the NCS measure and a tendency for a difference was found for the RCS measure. In addition, all three sub-measures (NCS, AGRI, RCS) were correlated to verbal fluency in the children with CI, but not the children without HL.

Language has been suggested to play a facilitating role for analogical reasoning tasks, especially for those with high complexity. This study aims to evaluate if differences in analogical reasoning...

When children start formal education, they are expected to be able to express complex thoughts. However, in order to do so, they need to be able to use both complex grammatical structures and a variety of words. One group that is at risk of having a delay in terms of their expressive language ability is children with cochlear implants (CI). In this study, we evaluated whether children with CI perform comparably to children with typical hearing (TH) on a standard expressive spoken grammar and a standard expressive spoken vocabulary task when the groups were matched on non-verbal intelligence and working memory capacity. It was found that the children with CI in this study performed more poorly on a standard expressive spoken vocabulary task but not on a standard expressive spoken grammar task when compared to the children with TH. Differences in terms of expressive spoken vocabulary do not seem to be explained by differences in cognitive ability. In addition, the variation in terms of expressive spoken language ability was larger in the children with CI compared to the children with TH. This might be explained by additional confounding factors, like the time of language deprivation or by a greater influence of cognitive differences for the acquisition of spoken language for children with CI.

The semantic network structure is a core aspect of the mental lexicon and is, therefore, a key to understanding language development processes. This study investigated the structure of the semantic network of adolescents with intellectual disability (ID) and children with typical development (TD) using network analysis. The semantic networks of the participants (n_ID = 66; n_TD = 49) were estimated from the semantic verbal fluency task with the pathfinder method. The groups were matched on the number of produced words. The average shortest path length (ASPL), the clustering coefficient (CC), and the network’s modularity (Q) of the two groups were compared. A significantly smaller ASPL and Q and a significantly higher CC were found for the adolescents with ID in comparison with the children with TD. Reasons for this might be differences in the language environment and differences in cognitive skills. The quality and quantity of the language input might differ for adolescents with ID due to differences in school curricula and because persons with ID tend to engage in different out-of-school activities compared to TD peers. Future studies should investigate the influence of different language environments on the language development of persons with ID.