Similar Gaze Behaviour during Dialogue Perception in Congenitally Deaf Children with Cochlear Implants and Normal Hearing Children

Background: Perceptual and speech production abilities of children with cochlear implants (CIs) are usually tested by word and sentence repetition or naming tests. However, these tests are quite far apart from daily life linguistic contexts. Aim: Here, we describe a way of investigating the link between language comprehension and anticipatory verbal behaviour promoting the use of more complex listening situations. Methods and Procedure: The setup consists in watching the audio-visual dialogue of two actors. Children's gaze switches from one speaker to the other serve as a proxy of their prediction abilities. Moreover, to better understand the basis and the impact of anticipatory behaviour, we also measured children's ability to understand the dialogue content, their speech perception and memory skills as well as their rhythmic skills, that also require temporal predictions. Importantly, we compared children with CI performances with those of an age-matched group of children with normal hearing (NH). Outcomes and Results: While children with CI revealed poorer speech perception and verbal working memory abilities than NH children, there was no difference in gaze anticipatory behaviour. Interestingly, in children with CI only, we found a significant correlation between dialogue comprehension, perceptual skills and gaze anticipatory behaviour. Conclusion: Our results extend to a dialogue context of previous findings showing an absence of predictive deficits in children with CI. The current design seems an interesting avenue to provide an accurate and objective estimate of anticipatory language behaviour in a more ecological linguistic context also with young children.