Macrostructural and microstructural discourse abilities in children with hearing impairment

Abstract

Hearing loss can hinder a child’s growth of speech and language skills. Earlier research has emphasized that children with Hearing loss have hitches in narrative development relative to their hearing peers both in terms of macro-structure and with micro-structural devices. The present study aims at comparing the discourse abilities under macro and micro structural aspects in children with hearing Impairment (HI) who have been receiving instruction in English at school and Tamil as their mother tongue with age matched typically developing children (TDC). Picture description Narrative sample from a total of 20 children (10 HI and 10 TDC) were collected and the discourse abilities were calculated based on the protocol prepared. Macrostructure of the narrative is descriptively documented using qualitative analysis and the microstructure elements are documented using quantitative analysis. The results revealed significant difference in most of the discourse domains in which the children with Hearing impairment performed poorer than their age matched peers.