pragmatic skills in children with cochlear implants

Introduction: pragmatics refers to how language is used in social communication. pragmatics has different dimensions. this study investigated the turn-taking, topic maintenance, and duration of topic maintenance in children with cochlear implants (cis) and normal-hearing children matched with chronological age and language age. materials and methods: in this cross-sectional study, pragmatics were compared in 15 ci children, 15 normal-hearing children matched with chronological age, and 15 normal-hearing children matched with language age. pragmatic skills of subjects such as turn-taking, topic maintenance, and duration of topic maintenance in verbal conversation were observed and measured in two groups including ci children with age-matched peers and ci children with language-matched normal-hearing children. the children’s conversations were transcribed and the data were analyzed based on the normality of their distribution by independent-sample t-test and mann-whitney u tests. results: findings showed no significant difference between the mean of turn-taking, topic maintenance, and duration of topic maintenance skills of ci children with their hearing peers (p>0.05). also, the results obtained by comparing the mean of turn-taking, topic maintenance, and duration of topic maintenance skills in ci children with normal-hearing children matched with language age did not show a significant difference (p>0.05). conclusion: children with cis achieved a level of skills in turn-taking, topic maintenance, and duration of topic maintenance, which was similar to age-matched and language-matched normal-hearing children. probably, the duration of auditory experience after cochlear implantation, age of implantation of the prosthesis, age of diagnosis of hearing loss, age of rehabilitation intervention, and family follow-up have been effective in achieving these skills.