A preliminary account of phonological and morphophonological perception in young children with and without otitis media

Abstract

This investigation examined the effects of otitis media with effusion (OME) and its associated fluctuating conductive hearing loss on the perception of phonological and morphophonological /s/ and /z/ in young children. We predicted that children free of OME (OME) would perform better than children with histories of OME (OME+). We also predicted that for the OME+ group morphological perception would be harder than phonological perception, because the former category carries an additional linguistic load (i.e., plurality). Sixteen children, ages 26 to 28 months (M =26.5, SD=0.6) were divided into two groups, the OME (n =8) and OME + (n =8) based on OME history during the first year of life. Subjects in the OME group were free of the disease for 4/5 visits and pure tone average (PTA) was 12.6 dB HL (SD=4.8). Subjects in the OME+ group had the disease on 3/5 visits and PTA was 23dB HL (SD=2.7). Experimental stimuli were six monosyllabic novel word-pairs. Members of each word-pair differed only in the presence of final voiced or voiceless fricative, marking the targets phonologically (e.g., [g6]/[g6 s] as in ‘law’, ‘loss’) or morphophonologically (e.g., [dæp]/[dæps] as in ‘map’ ‘maps’). Subjects were taught the unfamiliar word pairs using a fast mapping procedure. Perception was tested with the bimodal preferential looking paradigm. Children in the OME group performed significantly better than their OME+ counterparts. Individual word-pair analyses showed that OME+ group performed more poorly than the OME group on one phonological and on two morphological targets, all ending with [s]. For the OME+ group, targets with final [s] posed greater difficulty than those with final [z], especially on morphophonological plural-{s) targets. The results suggested that the fluctuating hearing loss associated with OME might have a negative impact on speech perception.