Plurilingualism in deaf children with CI in multicultural contexts
Research type
Research Study
Full title
The Acquisition of Multiple Spoken Languages in deaf children with Cochlear Implants who grow up in Plurilingual Contexts
IRAS ID
312072
Contact name
Elettra Casellato
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Leeds
Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier
n/a, n/a
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 0 months, 1 days
Research summary
The study focuses on the context for language development in children who are deaf, wear Cochlear Implants and come from plurilingual and multicultural families. To this day, scientific literature about children who are d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing (d/DHH) has focused on estimating their linguistic development quantitatively, in order to compare them to their hearing, 'typically developed' peers. This has been done by assessing d/DHH children with tests ideated and standardised on a hearing (and often) monolingual population. Until this moment, few researchers focused on the role of context and amount of exposure to each language as significant for these children's language development. This research aims to bring attention to these aspects as we believe they are crucial to understanding their language and communication development.
This study will focus on young children who have been fitted with cochlear implants and grow up in plurilingual and multicultural families. Families will be assessed with a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews to gather data about their linguistic background and habits. SOLOM will be used to gain a general understanding of the child's linguistic skills in both English the language other than English. The teacher of the Deaf who has contacts with the family will complete SOLOM for English, while the parents will do the same regarding their language/s. LENA technology will be used to record the exposure the child has to each language during two typical days, to see if and how these data relate to the child's linguistic abilities reported by both professionals and parents.
Through a review of the literature, current assessment methods will be critically analysed to understand whether they can be considered reliable sources of information for this specific population, as they were created and standardised on a different one (Hearing monolingual children).REC name
East Midlands - Derby Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
22/EM/0177
Date of REC Opinion
18 Aug 2022
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion