Comprehension and production of English plural morphology by school-age deaf and hard-of-hearing children

Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) preschoolers have difficulty comprehending and producing English plural morphology. This study investigated their comprehension and production of the plural at primary-school age using novel words, to better understand their mental representation of plural morphology. Thirty 5- to 9-year-old DHH children and 31 children with normal hearing (NH) completed a two-alternative forced-choice comprehension task and a wug production task. Performance was not significantly poorer for DHH children, though some morphophonological contexts proved challenging for both groups. Performance was correlated with vocabulary size. This suggests that, if DHH children have sufficient vocabulary, they may perform like primary school NH peers in plural comprehension and production.