Production of Persian Inflectional Morphemes, Phrase & Clause Structures Based on P-LARSP: A Comparison of Children With Moderately Severe hearing Loss & Children With Normal Hearing

Introduction: In spite of all progressions in hearing amplification, hearing screening and intervention, there are still concerns around the language outcomes in children with mild to severe hearing loss. The present study aimed to investigate the performance on production of inflectional morphemes & phrase & clause structures of children with moderately severe hearing loss (MSHL) and compare with those of the children with normal hearing (NH). Materials & Methods: Participants were 88 children with NH, aged 2-5 years old, and 10 children with MSHL, aged 5-6 years old recruited by convenient sampling. Speech therapists collected language samples in a free play context, and then they transcribed and segmented language samples according to P-LARSP. From 100 analyzable units, they identified, allocated and counted 14 inflectional morphemes and all clause & phrase structures in each language sample. Results: Children with MSHL had significantly fewer numbers of inflectional morphemes (p = 0.004), verb/complement + personal pronoun (p = 0.009), and prefix /mi/ as a tense marker (p = 0.025), lower MLUmorpheme/analyzable utterances (p = 0.003), higher percentages of one-word utterances (p = 0.001), and lower numbers of clause structures in stage V (p = 0.002) compared with children with NH aged 4-5 years old. While the types of clause structures in children with MSHL were similar to the children with NH aged 24-36 months, the types of produced inflectional morphemes were restricted compared with the all groups of children with NH. Conclusion: The present study revealed that children with MSHL lag behind younger children with NH in grammatical aspects of Persian language. They used simpler clauses, limited numbers & types of inflectional morphemes, and clause & phrase structures, and mainly relied on one-word utterances. Continued monitoring of grammatical outcomes is warranted considering that children who are MSHL are at increased risk for language problems.