Smith, S., Pereira, M., Ravina, R., Carr, C., Ackal, L., & de Villiers, P. (2011). QuestionQuest: Facilitating Syntax and Pragmatics through Optimized Software. Paper presented at Clarke School for Hearing and Speech, Northampton, MA, May, 2011.
Background
Children with hearing impairment often have language delays attributable to impoverished receptive language exposure.
Questions pose a special challenge for children with hearing impairment because the grammatical operations required
to ask, understand, and answer questions are more complex than those required for simple declarative utterances,
and require greater syntactic fluency. Teachers at the Clarke School for Hearing and Speech in Northampton Massachusetts
sought to determine whether their oral deaf kindergarten and first grade children might benefit from using Laureate’s QuestionQuest ® software,
which is designed to build fluency in the grammatical forms essential to mastering questions.
Methods
Fourteen oral deaf children ages 5.4 to 8.4 years (mean=6.5 years), most with cochlear implants, participated in
the field study. They were pre-tested using a 15 item wh-question elicited production test based on the Diagnostic
Evaluation of Language Variation (DELV; Seymour, Roeper, & de Villiers, 2003). They were also tested on 17
untrained morphosyntax production items (e.g., tense markers, copula, possessive) from the DELV Screening Test.
The children then used the QuestionQuest software for 30 minutes/day, usually 3 times a week, for 8 weeks,
after which they were retested using alternate versions of the same tests.
Results
At post-test it was found that scores on the wh-question elicited production test more than doubled; a difference
that was highly significant (t = 3.58, df = 13, p=0.003). Test scores on the untrained morphosyntax items did not
change significantly (t = 0.877, df = 13, p=0.4).
Pre- and post-test scores on the wh-question elicited production test.
The authors noted that improvements in elicited production were evident in students across a range of initial ability: Some children who initially did not produce wh-questions did so after training, while others with initially limited production of wh-questions expanded their repertoire.
This study suggests that massed practice using QuestionQuest,which features carefully constructed scenarios that highlight the semantic and syntactic features of questions, was an effective means of providing these children with the critical language input they needed to improve their abilities to understand, ask, and answer questions.
