(PP1110) Children Improve Bound Morpheme Understanding: Assessment Procedure and Results

The purpose was to develop an assessment procedure to differentiate linguistic understanding from acoustic perception for bound morphemes. To do this, we developed a specialized assessment procedure to measure gains in bound morpheme understanding.  We administered the assessment to 78 elementary school aged children with hearing loss before and after computerized auditory/audio-visual training that included bound morpheme training.

Summary: 

Purpose: The purpose was to develop an assessment procedure to differentiate linguistic understanding from acoustic perception for bound morphemes.  The goals of this investigation were to evaluate the ability of the assessment procedure to differentiate linguistic understanding from acoustic perception of bound morphemes (plurals, contractions, possessives, past-tense) and to evaluate the effectiveness of 16-hours of listening training that included bound morpheme training.  

Method: Seventy-eight elementary school-age children with hearing loss played a computer game designed to improve perception and understanding of bound morphemes. The children were assigned randomly to either an A, AV, or A-AV training group. The bound morpheme assessment procedure allowed the differentiation between a measure of understanding of a bound morpheme’s meaning and the children’s ability to perceive the phoneme(s) at the end of a root word.

Results: Overall, the assessment appeared to be able to differentiate between perception and understanding.  Participants significantly improved their understanding of bound morphemes but not their perception, which was relatively high even before training. The most improvement occurred for possessives, from 48.8% bound morphemes understood pre-training (which is chance performance) to 68.3% and past tense from 56.2% to 70.7%. By contrast, performance for contractions, which was at a high level from the onset, changed only from 90.6% to 92.3%.

Conclusions: The developed assessment procedure appears to be a useful tool for teaching linguistic structures to children with hearing loss. Similar training benefits were observed whether children were instructed in an A, AV, or A-AV modality, a finding that is relevant to discussions about auditory-verbal versus an audiovisual method of instruction.