Parental Linguistic Input to Children Who are Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing during Parent-Child Interaction: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Objectives: Parental linguistic input has long been shown to predict children’s later language ability. This study aimed to characterize the quantity and quality of parental linguistic input of children who are deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) through systematic literature and meta-analysis. Methods: One thousand seven hundred sixty-one articles from 2001 to February 2022 investigating parental linguistic input in children with DHH were identified via database searches. Nine articles were identified that met the PICOS (Participants, Intervention, Comparison, Outcomes, and Study design) criteria. A systematic review and meta-analysis of the literature were conducted. We used mixed effects models to estimate the overall mean effect size metric to address each research question. Results: As a result of the systematic literature review, the selected articles had a low risk of bias. In a considerable number of the presented meta-analytic articles, mothers and children aged 24–36 months participated. We did detect significant differences in the number of total words, the number of different words, and the proportion of the high-level facilitative language techniques from the parents’ utterances between the DHH and the typical hearing (TH) groups. On the other hand, there was not a significant difference in the number of total utterances between the two groups. Conclusion: This meta-analysis reports on different patterns of parental linguistic input between children with DHH and children with TH. We conclude with a discussion of the findings and consideration of the implications for research.