Treatment Effects on Language Skills Using Discrete Trial Training on a Child With Late Cochlear Implant: A Case Study

Discrete trial training (DTT) was used to test its effects on four target grammatical morphemes and its generalisation and maintenance to untrained stimulus exemplars in a child with late cochlear implantation. A 6.9-year-old female child with profound hearing loss who had late cochlear implantation at 5.6 years with no other known sensory and cognitive co-morbidities underwent DTT. Treatment trials using the behavioural principles of DTT were carried out by presenting the target exemplars on a personal laptop in a sequential order using a background animation with and without modelling. Treatment progress was monitored in every session that lasted 45 minutes for a total of 22 sessions. Treatment trials for the four grammatical morphemes showed 100% acquisition within the first 20 trials. The child also showed an ability to generalise the learned grammatical morphemes to untrained exemplars on the probes that followed, to a criterion of 90%. A response accuracy of 90% was also observed for untrained exemplars 20 days post-treatment. DTT can reduce the treatment time for rehabilitating grammatical morphemes in children with hearing impairment. The rate of language development and the observed maintenance imply that DTT is one of the promising approaches to treat language deficits in children with late cochlear implants.