Delayed Wh-Question Development in Children with Hearing Loss: Evidence for Morphosyntactic Vulnerability from Corpus-Based NLP and LLM Analyses
Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: This study provides corpus-based evidence that English-speaking children with hearing loss (CHL) show both quantitative and qualitative delays in wh-question development compared to typically developing (TD) peers.Using Natural Language Processing (NLP)/Large Language Model (LLM) based methods and two clinical subcorpora from CHILDES, we analyzed child utterances across several syntactic dimensions: frequency, lexical diversity, structural completeness, clausal embedding, wh-fronting, and utterance length.CHL produced significantly fewer wh-questions, used a narrower range of wh-types, showed lower rates of embedding, and more structural incompleteness.These differences were most evident in syntactically complex forms, such as embedded and canonical fronted wh-questions.The results support input-sensitive and usagebased accounts of syntactic development and highlight the need for enriched linguistic input in supporting CHL's grammatical growth.Importantly, these group differences persisted when controlling for overall language development as indexed by mean length of utterance (MLU) in words, indicating that CHL's difficulties with wh-questions are not reducible to general grammatical delay.Methodologically, the study combines dependency-parsing-based analyses with exploratory LLM evaluation to assess the feasibility and limits of automated approaches to spontaneous child language.NLPbased analyses were more stable for formally defined syntactic features, while GPT-based analysis showed mixed performance, performing better on global structural judgments than on fine-grained syntactic diagnostics.
Author: Tong Wu
Institution: Leiden University
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7140129927