Effects of hearing loss on the understanding of synonym words in fifth graders

Substantial delays in spoken language acquisition have been documented for children with severe to profound hearing loss. Accordingly, areas of linguistic research in this population have shifted from measuring vocabulary size to studies designed to understand word learning processes including semantic development. The purpose of this study was to determine the differences between students with hearing loss and their normal peers on the grounds of synonym comprehension. 78 fifth graders who were all resident in Isfahan participated in this descriptive-analytic cross-sectional study. Of this number, fifty-two students had normal hearing ability and remaining twenty-four ones had hearing loss attending special education classes. The data of interest were gathered via two paper-based tests in which synonyms of each word should be written once in the context of a sentence and once out of such context by each subject. Hearing-loss and normal-hearing groups significantly differed from each other in both tests (P < 0.05). All students in both groups had significantly higher ability in understanding synonyms when words were embedded in the context of a sentence than on the occasions in which target words represented out of the context (P < 0.05). Due to differences between hearing and hearing-loss students, it seems that the semantic category of synonym words is affected by hearing impairment as are other language areas. In addition, the different performance of subjects in two tests implies that synonyms extracted from the context are more difficult than synonyms embedded in a semantic context.