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Emily Grenner & Joost van de Weijer & Lena Asker-Árnason & Victoria Johansson & Viktoria Åkerlund & Birgitta S.M. Sahlén The aim of this intervention study is to investigate if observational learning can improve narrative writing skills in 11-year-olds with and without hearing impairment. Observational learning occurs when people learn new skills from observing others, who act as models (Bandura 1997). Observing peers’ reading and writing is especially important since these processes often are invisible, and children therefore lack models for their own processes. This study was theoretically and methodologically inspired by Rijlaarsdam et al. 2008. Participants consisted of Swedish 5th-graders from two schools (School A, n=33; and School B, n= 26) with normal hearing children (NH), and from 3rd to 8:th-grade children with hearing-impairment (HI), from “hearing classes” (n=18). Prior to the intervention, background data e.g., on working memory and linguistic background was collected. In the research design the two schools with NH children (School A and B) functioned as each other's controls. The HI-school followed the School A order. All participants first wrote a personal narrative on the computer, using keystroke-logging. Then the intervention followed for School A and HI-school, while School B received ordinary lessons (with no writing instructions). After the first intervention period, all participants wrote a new narrative. Thereafter, the intervention was replicated for School B, while School A and the HI-school had ordinary tutoring. After the second intervention period, all participants wrote new narratives. The intervention consisted of 5 thematically different lessons: Lesson themes were: reader perspective, chronological structure, closing elements, revising of a peer’s text and online revision. To evaluate the text quality, all texts (n=231) were holistically rated by three independent, trained evaluators. The results showed an impro

The present study investigated WM capacity, lexical access, phonological skills and reading ability in 6 children with cochlear implants (CI), attending grades 1-3. For each test measure, the individual performance of the children with CI was compared to a grade-matched comparison group of children with normal hearing. Performance was also studied in relation to demographic factors. The results reveal that the children with CI have specific difficulties in tasks of phonological skills and phonological working memory (WM) where nonwords are used as test stimuli. They do not seem to have problems with phonological processing of words for which they have a well defined phonological representation. They also experienced relatively more difficulties in tasks on lexical access without any contextual info. We suggest that children with CI are particularly efficient in using compensatory strategies in situations where their auditory perception does not provide sufficient information to correctly match the incoming speech signal to a corresponding representation in the long-term phonological storage. The children with CI in this study are skilled readers, both for decoding of words and nonwords and for reading comprehension. They may use both orthographic and phonological reading strategies although most of them seem to be dependent on phonological decoding to some extent.

The purpose of the study was to explore the narrative writing of 18 children, ages 11 to 19, with severe and profound hearing impairment who had cochlear implants (CI), compared with the performance of hearing children. Nine of the 18 children had prelingual deafness and 9 children had postlingual deafness. The hearing impairment was progressive in 11 children. The participants thus formed a heterogeneous group, which was split in two ways: according to age at testing and age at implantation. The narratives were collected by means of keystroke logging. The difference between the children with CI and the hearing children was most prominent for two measures: the percentage of pause time (in the group of children older than 13 years) and lexical density. Furthermore, the children implanted after 5 years of age performed more like the hearing children. This group consisted of children with postlingual deafness and also of children who were deafened progressively. Our interpretation is that these children benefited from the early linguistic input. Taking the whole group of participants into consideration, the results reflect linguistic and cognitive processing limitations in complex linguistic tasks like narration for the children with CI in comparison with their hearing peers.

and profound hearing impairment treated by cochlear implants (CI). In this study we explore this relationship in sixteen Swedish children with CI. We found that over 60% of the children with CI performed at the level of their hearing peers in a reading comprehension test. Demographic factors were not predictive of reading comprehension, but a complex working memory task was. Reading percentile was significantly correlated to the working memory test, but no other correlations between reading and cognitive/linguistic factors remained significant after age was factored out. Individual results from a comparison of the two best and the two poorest readers corroborate group results, confirming the important role of working memory for reading as measured by comprehension of words and sentences in this group of children.

The present study investigated the relationships between orthographic learning and other aspects of reading (phonological and orthographic decoding and comprehension) in Swedish children (age 7–9yrs). Cognitive correlates of orthographic learning were also studied, as well as the cognitive predictors of decoding skill and reading comprehension. The results indicated that orthographic learning was related to all the other aspects of reading. Orthographic learning and decoding skills were both related to phonological and visuospatial working memory. Reading comprehension was associated with phonological- and general working memory. The findings are discussed with reference to the component model of working memory.

The present study investigated the relationships between orthographic learning and other aspects of reading (phonological and orthographic decoding and comprehension) in Swedish children (age 7–9yrs). Cognitive correlates of orthographic learning were also studied, as well as the cognitive predictors of decoding skill and reading comprehension. The results indicated that orthographic learning was related to all the other aspects of reading. Orthographic learning and decoding skills were both related to phonological and visuospatial working memory. Reading comprehension was associated with phonological- and general working memory. The findings are discussed with reference to the component model of working memory.