Analysis of maternal morphemes:Input provided to children using cochlear implants

Shani Dettman1,2, Melina Ramp1, Colleen Holt1, Richard Dowell1,2,3, Denise Courtenay3

1 The University of Melbourne, Department of Otolaryngology, 2 The HEARing Cooperative Research Centre, 3Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital

Aims of the Study. Very few studies have attempted to document the full range of linguistic expressions and constructions that children with normal hearing and

children with significant hearing loss have exposure to in their daily lives. This study investigated the length of input that parents used when talking to their children with

significant hearing loss, which enabled comparisons to be made with existing data for hearing children. It was hypothesized that the length of MLU would be fine-tuned tothe child’s chronological age. Secondly, this study provided a detailed description of the types and prevalence of morphemes that were embedded in the parentallanguage directed to the child.

Background to this study The nature and prevalence of linguistic forms provided by the

mother is of considerable interest to clinicians working with children who have significant hearing loss.Clinicians currently guide and coach parents to provide the best possible language input and languagemodels to the child, but understanding whether parents should be encouraged to use single words, whole

phrases, or more enriched discourse input is unproven at this time.

MLU Results The average maternal MLUm and MLUw was 3.51 and 3.02 respectively, and

ranged from 1.26 to 8.74 for morphemes and 1.24 to 6.94 for words. Overall, parents did increase thelength of their MLUm (red triangles) and MLUw (black squares) in line with the child’s age (Figure 2).There was a significant correlation between MLUm and age at sample (r=0.501, p<0.001) and duration

post CI (r=0.664, p<0.001) and a significant correlation between MLUw and age at sample (r=0.509,p<0.001) and duration post CI (r=0.544, p<0.001).

Deafness Foundation

…to understand the nature of the relationship …to understand the nature of the relationship …to understand the nature of the relationship …to understand the nature of the relationship between maternal input ‘IN’ and the child’s language between maternal input ‘IN’ and the child’s language between maternal input ‘IN’ and the child’s language between maternal input ‘IN’ and the child’s language

acquisition and ‘OUTPUT’acquisition and ‘OUTPUT’acquisition and ‘OUTPUT’acquisition and ‘OUTPUT’

For young hearing children who are learning language, the literature suggests that parents use modifiedlinguistic input such as shorter utterances (Phillips, 1973; Snow, 1972), fewer broken or run onsentences, less complex but well formed grammatically correct sentences, and approximately 50% ofutterances are single words or short declaratives (Owens, 1992, p. 233). These simplifications in theparent’s input appear to support vocabulary development and the acquisition of receptive and expressive

language. Cross (1977) did not find that parental input was always fine-tuned to the child’s linguisticabilities and demonstrated low correlations between some variables under study. Overall, however,results suggested a relationship between parental discourse, referential and syntactic features with thechild’s receptive skills, ability to get the message across, age, vocabulary (type-token ratio), andmeasures of utterance length (longest utterance and mean). Thus, the parents of the infants with normal

hearing in Cross’ (1977) study appeared to be altering many facets of their input at different times.

One measure of linguistic complexity is the mean length of utterances in ‘morphemes’ (MLUm). As thechild learns language, he/she comes to understand that some words are made up of smaller functionalparts. These smaller units of meaning are called morphemes and include: unbound morphemes (we

refer to as words) consisting of sole morphemes (simple content words) such as ball, walk, car, functionand social words such as no, a, to, you, and bound morphemes such as inflectional and derivationalbound morphemes e.g. prefixes/suffixes or grammatical markers such as im-, dis-, possessive –s, andpast tense –ed. Brown (1973) suggested that a child acquires these meaningful units in a typical orderand there is some debate in the literature whether their order of acquisition is related to the parental input

frequency, parental ‘rough-’ or ‘fine-’ tuning or due to other factors.

p<0.001) and duration post CI (r=0.544, p<0.001).

Figure 2. Parental MLU in morphemes (red triangles) and MLU in words (black squares)N=20 children with significant hearing loss using cochlear implants.

There was a wide variation in maternal MLUm and MLUw to children with significant hearing loss(Figure 2) in comparison to the averages for parental input to children with normal hearing (Figure 1).Some mothers persisted with shorter MLU to their 3 and 4 year olds, as if they were speaking to toddlers.

Importantly, there was an absence of longer maternal input early in the child’s development. Someparents reduced input to single words in a ‘teaching’ style of interaction. The authors suggest that parentswere unaware of the importance of exposing the child to the full rich character of the language or wereconfused whether to fine-tune their MLU to the child’s hearing age, chronological age or linguistic ability.

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Parental MLU appears to be a good match to the child’s linguistic abilities and varies according to thelanguage used and the age of the listener. The MLU results from a range of studies investigating input tochildren with normal hearing and normal language are charted against the child participants’

chronological age in Figure 1. Results suggest a longer maternal input length during the neonatal period(Penman et al., 1983; Phillips, 1973) while the child has the opportunity to listen to his/her nativelanguage. Subsequent to this, we see a low or falling maternal MLU in the child’s first year of life prior tothe emergence of the child’s first words (Murray, Johnson & Peters, 1990), followed by a gradual increasein MLU with each child chronological year (Cramblit & Siegel, 1977; Cross, 1977; Kaye, 1980; Lasky &

Klopp, 1982; Lord, 1975, cited in Owens, 1992; Newport, Gleitman & Gleitman, 1977; Seewald &Brackett, 1984).

confused whether to fine-tune their MLU to the child’s hearing age, chronological age or linguistic ability.Seewald and Bracket (1991) suggested that parents of children with hearing loss may believe the

common and naïve view of language learning; that it occurs in a ‘bottom-up’ rather than ‘top down’fashion. Parents who perceive themselves in this teaching role may reflect this in their style ofinteracting, and may provide far more language at the word level rather than the phrase level. Weobserved (Figure 3, below) that children only had the opportunity to hear numerous examples of boundmorphemes (20 or more bound morphemes in a 50 utterance sample) once the parental MLUm

exceeded 3 or 4.

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Figure 3. Raw score difference between bound morpheme and word total.

Bound Morpheme Types Themorphemes found in the present study that werealso described by Brown (1973) are on the left ofFigure 4, below (e.g. -ing, plural -s, irregularpast tense, possessive –‘s, regular past tense-ed). Other bound morphemes, not described byBrown, continue from left to right in no particularorder. The following were frequently heard bythe children;

• contracted copula BE e.g. that’s, he’s

• contracted modal auxiliary will, e.g. she’ll

• regular plural -s e.g. cats, • present progressive Ving form e.g. jumping

In contrast, there were infrequent opportunitiesfor the children to hear;

• irregular plurals e.g. mouse/mice

• comparatives e.g. big-bigger

• superlatives e.g. biggest

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Maternal MLU morphemes

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Figure 1. Parental MLU to children with normal hearing. Each black box represents mean MLU results.

Methods and Materials Twenty children who received a cochlear implant before 4 years of

age, were recorded in play for over 10 minutes with their mothers pre- and post-implant (mean age atsample 2.74 yrs, range 1.04 to 7.70, SD 1.10). All maternal input was orthographically transcribed and

analysed. Previous literature had used Browns (1973) 14 morphemes which is a simplified list of justsome of the morphemes used in everyday speech. In order to complete this analysis, the authorsdeveloped two tools; a definition of the types of morphemes in Australian English and an alphabeticalglossary to aid coding. The mean length of utterance in morphemes (MLUm) and words (MLUw) from50 consecutive utterances, from 175 samples was calculated. Individual bound morphemes were

defined and totalled for each sample. The raw score total of each bound morpheme type was expressedas a percentage of all bound morphemes to derive the prevalence.

creating sound value

www.hearingcrc.org

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Chronological Age (years)

Figure 4. Prevalence of each bound morpheme type expressed as a percentage of all bound morphemes, across 175 samples from N=20 children.

Conclusions A social interactionist account of language acquisition would suggest that maternal language input has important facilitatory effects on child language

development. This study has determined that for some cases, maternal MLU to children with significant hearing loss may be shorter than MLU in speech directed to hearingchildren. Although mothers in this study did increase MLU over time in line with the child’s chronological development, important exposure to particular morphemes appeared tobe lacking. Infrequently heard bound morphemes are the same morphemes for which children with significant hearing loss typically demonstrate poor understanding and

expression, suggesting that specific training is required.

Acknowledgements to the patients, speech pathologists, audiologists , surgeons and administrative staff at the Cochlear Implant Clinic, RVEEH, Melbourne, Australia.

dettmans@unimelb.edu.au

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