A preliminary account of phonological and morphophonological perception inyoung children with and without otitis media

This investigation examined the effects of otitis media with effusion (OME) and its associated fluctuating conductive hearing loss on the perception o f phonological and morphophonological /s/ and /z/ in young children. We pre dicted that children free of OME (OME-) would perform better than children with histories of OME (OME+). We also predicted that for the OME+ group mor phological perception would be harder than phonological perception because the former category carries an additional linguistic load (i.e., plurality) . Sixteen children, ages 26 to 28 months (M = 26.5, SD = 0.6) were divided into two groups, the OME- (n=8) and OME + (n=8) based on OME history during the first year of Life. Subjects in the OME- group were free of the diseas e for 4/5 visits and pure tone average (PTA) was 12.6 dB HL (SD=4.8). Subje cts in the OME+ group had the disease on 3/5 visits and PTA was 23 dB HT, ( SD=2.7). Experimental stimuli were six monosyllabic novel word-pairs. Membe rs of each word-pair differed only in the presence of final voiced or voice less fricative, marking the targets phonologically (e.g., [g superset of]/[ g superset ofs] as in 'law','loss') or morphophonologically (e.g., [daep]/[ daeps] as in 'map' 'maps'). Subjects were taught the unfamiliar word pairs using a fast mapping procedure. Perception was tested with the bimodal pref erential looking paradigm. Children in the OME- group performed significant ly better than their OME+ counterparts. Individual word-pair analyses showe d that OME+ group performed more poorly than the OME- group on one phonolog ical and on two morphological targets, all ending with [s]. For the OME+ gr oup, targets with final [s] posed greater difficulty than those with final [z], especially on morphophonological plural -{s) targets. The results sugg ested that the fluctuating hearing loss associated with OME might have a ne gative impact on speech perception.