Inflectional morphology in German hearing-impaired children

Despite modern hearing aids, children with hearing impairment often have only restricted access to spoken language input during the ‘critical’ years for language acquisition. Specifically, a sensorineural hearing impairment affects the perception of voiceless coronal consonants which realize verbal affixes in German. The aim of this study is to explore if German hearing-impaired children have problems in producing and/or acquiring inflectional suffixes expressed by such phonemes. The findings of two experiments (an elicitation task and a picture-naming task) conducted with a group of hearing-impaired monolingual German children (age 3–4 years) demonstrate that difficulties in perceiving specific phonemes relate to the avoidance of these same sounds in speech production independent of the grammatical function these phonemes have.