Which Questions Do Children With Cochlear Implants Understand? An Eye-Tracking Study

Purpose The purpose of this study was to investigate the processing of morphosyntactic cues (case and verb agreement) by children with cochlear implants (CIs) in German which-questions, where interpretation depends on these morphosyntactic cues. The aim was to examine whether children with CIs who perceive the different cues also make use of them in speech comprehension and processing in the same way as children with normal hearing (NH). Method Thirty-three children with CIs (age 7;01–12;04 years;months, M = 9;07, bilaterally implanted before age 3;3) and 36 children with NH (age 7;05–10;09 years, M = 9;01) received a picture selection task with eye tracking to test their comprehension of subject, object, and passive which-questions. Two screening tasks tested their auditory discrimination of case morphology and their perception and comprehension of subject–verb agreement. Results Children with CIs who performed well on the screening tests still showed more difficulty on the comprehension of object questi...