Emergence of consonants in young children with hearing loss

This study investigates consonant development in the spoken language of 269 children with hearing loss between 15 and 84 months of age. Children with mild, moderate, severe, and profound degrees of bilateral hearing loss, including those with cochlear implants, were evaluated. Speech samples from 885 different test sessions of 25-minute parent-child interactions were analyzed to determine phoneme development across a variety of age levels and degrees of hearing loss. This study reports the age at which 50% and 80% of the children produced each of the consonants in the English language. Overall, children in all of the hearing loss groups produced most English consonants by 84 months of age. The data suggest that children with hearing loss develop phonemes in a similar pattern to children with typical hearing, although the rate of development is delayed for later-developing consonants and the delay increases with the degree of hearing loss.