Évaluation de la production morphosyntaxique chez un enfant québécois francophone porteur d'implant cochléaire
This study describes the development of morphosyntactic and morphophonological structures in French-speaking children between 3 and 6 years. This data will contribute to identifying morphosyntaxic and morphophonoligical difficulties found in the hearing impaired child from Quebec with a cochlear implant. The first purpose of our pilot project aims to compare the morphosyntactic and morphophonological abilities of children with cochlear implants to those of hearing children of the same hearing and chronological age. In particular, this study investigates gender and number agreement between nouns and processes of fusion, elision and liaison. We hypothesize that less auditory experience will have an impact on the acquisition of morpho(phono)logical rules in French. The second purpose of the study is to observe whether or not mastery of certain morphological structures of French is linked to the phonemic production in children with cochlear implants. We created two experimental tasks and used other clinical and experimental tasks to study morphological and phonetic difficulties in children with cochlear implants. The control group consists of 14 typical developing children. They were compared to Vincent, a 59-months-old child with a cochlear implant. This child appears to show a delay in achieving stages of language development, but that this delay corresponds to his hearing age (date of cochlear implant) rather than to his chronological age. On the phonological and morphosyntactic levels, we observed similarities and differences between Vincent and the normal hearing children: he was significantly below standard for certain morphosyntactic structures and morphophonological processes (gender agreement, elision, fusion) and better than controls in the liaison task.   We believe that improved hearing is not the only factor that has an impact on his early language development. Other factors might have influenced results, including age of implantation, communication modality, bilateral implantation, parental investment and learning effects. Finally, we cannot conclude from our case study whether or not phoneme of production mastery is related to mastery of mophological structures and processes.
Morphophonologie cochlear implant children language acquisition mophosyntax morphophonology language production hearing impairment