Phonological Awareness in Hearing Impaired Children

청각장애아동의 음운인식능력에 대한 연구

The purpose of this study is to examine the phonological awareness of hearing impaired children. A number of researches indicate that hearing impaired children have articulation disorders due to their impaired auditory feedback. However, in children who have the ability to distinguish certain phonemes, they sometimes show misarticulation of the phonemes. Phonological awareness refers to recognizing the speech-sound units and their forms in spoken language (Hong, 2001). The subjects who participated in the experiment are composed of four hearing impaired children (3 cochlear implanted children and 1 hearing aided child). Phonological Awareness was evaluated by the test battery developed by Paik et al. (2001). The subtests consisted of rhyme matching, onset matching I II, word initial segmentation and matching I II. If the children asked for retelling, it was retold to a maximum of 4 times. Each item score was 1 point. The results were compared to those of Paik et al. (2001). The results of study were that subject 1 showed superior rhyme matching ability, subjects 2 and 3 fair ability, and subject 4 inferior ability. In onset matching I, all subjects showed inferior ability except for subject 3. Interestingly, subjects 1 showed the lowest onset matching I score. In word initial segmentation and matching I, subjects 1 and 4 showed inferior ability and subjects 2 and 3 showed fair ability. In onset matching II, subject 2 showed the perfect score 10 even though she showed very low score. In word initial segmentation and matching II, only subjects 2 and 3 showed appropriate levels of the skill. The results show that the phonological awareness of hearing impaired children is different from that of normal children.