A systematic review of cross-linguistic and multilingual speech and language outcomes for children with hearing loss

The purpose of this study was to systematically review the factors affecting the language, speech intelligibility, speech production, and lexical tone development of children with hearing loss who use spoken languages other than English. Relevant studies of children with hearing loss published between 2000 and 2011 were reviewed with reference to (1) methodologies used, (2) children's outcomes, (3) factors affecting children's outcomes, and (4) publication quality. The review included 117 studies describing 20 languages. Monolingual children were described in 109, and multilingual children were described in 8. Better performance outcomes were frequently associated with earlier age of hearing loss diagnosis, intervention, amplification, and less severe hearing loss â€Â' a finding similar to studies of English-speaking children. Studies frequently did not report or include information about participant characteristics, blinding of researchers, and reliability. Cross-linguistic comparison of children's outcomes across studies was not possible due to differences in the outcomes assessed, assessment and analysis methods, and participant characteristics. There is a need for cross-linguistic comparisons of the speech and language outcomes of children with hearing loss, but there is little scope for this using existing published research. Few studies described the outcomes of multilingual children with hearing loss.