| Some families may have been cautioned against the use of more than one language in children with hearing loss (HL), which may be due to the potential difficulties with the acquisition of spoken language in children with HL who are monolingual speakers. Historically, there have been concerns that learning more than one language can lead to the development of language impairments in children without HL. However, there have been no data to support this claim (Waltzman et al., 2003). Furthermore, recent studies, have demonstrated that children with HL are indeed capable of developing second language competencies (Bunta & Douglas, 2013; Douglas, 2011a; Thomas, El-Kashlan, & Zwolan, 2008; Waltzman, McConkey, Green, & Cohen, 2003; Yim, 2011).;Children from Hispanic backgrounds have been observed to have higher levels of HL when compared to their peers of Caucasian or African-American descent (Lee, Gomez-Marin, & Lee, 1996). Additionally, children from Spanish-English bilingual backgrounds comprise the largest group of individuals learning a second language in the U.S., with more than 80% of Latino families reporting the use of another language in the home (Valasco & Dockerman, 2010).;As a result, speech-language pathologists (SLPs) are serving a growing number of children with HL who are from Spanish-English speaking backgrounds. Consequently, there is a need to further understand language development and use of a variety of language constructs in children who have HL and are bilingual, to assist clinicians in developing and using the most appropriate, evidence-based assessment and intervention approaches. One area needing investigation is morphosyntactic use in these children as few studies have evaluated morphosyntactic use in children with HL from dual language environments.;This dissertation presents three manuscripts. The first is focused on the studies that have been conducted to date relative to multilanguage use in children with HL and, based on the literature, reveals that children with HL are capable of developing second language competencies. The second study examines morphosyntactic use in Spanish and English in children with HL from dual language homes, comparing their performance to their monolingual and bilingual peers without HL. The final study examined English morphosyntactic use in children with HL from bilingual Spanish-English background and compares the results to published data on morphosyntactic use and development in monolingual children with HL. Results of study two revealed that morphosyntactic forms produced by participants in this study were similar to those used by monolingual Spanish and English and bilingual Spanish-English speaking children without HL, as reported in the literature.;Similar to study two, results from study three indicated that children with HL who were developing more than one oral language used features similar to their peers with HL who were developing only one oral language. |
