Acquisition of who-question comprehension in German children with hearing loss

•We investigate preschool children with permanent hearing loss (HL) and hearing aids.•Children with HL display difficulties in a wh-question comprehension task.•Object questions were more impaired than subject questions compared to controls.•Comprehension of who-questions can be delayed in children with HL by one year.•This comprehension deficit is overcome by school-age.

For children with sensorineural hearing loss the ability to understand wh-questions might be particularly challenging because they often have only restricted access to spoken language input during optimal periods of language acquisition. In previous research it has been suggested that this restricted input during critical stages in language acquisition might lead to syntactic deficits that persist into adolescence. In this study we want to pursue this issue by investigating the comprehension of wh-questions in German children with bilateral sensorineural hearing loss. We report results of a who-question comprehension task in a group of 21 3- to 4-year-old German hard-of-hearing children compared to a group of age-matched children with normal hearing. The group data and individual performance patterns suggest that the syntactic comprehension difficulties observed in some, but not all, of the children with hearing loss reflect a delay in the acquisition of who-question comprehension rather than a persistent syntactic deficit. Follow-up data elicited from a subgroup of children confirm this supposition.