Background and Objective: People with more lexical semantic abilities can be more achieved in communicating with others, and in understanding the spoken or written words or sentences of others. The aim of this study was determination and comparison of lexical semantic ability in hearing and hearing impaired adults from mild to profound levels of hearing loss.
Methods: This study is a cross-sectional descriptive analytic and non-interventional study. Lexical semantic ability of 20 normal and 73 hearing impaired (16 mild, 17 moderate, 20 severe, and 20 profound hearing impaired) evaluated by the lexical semantic test. Normal adults were 7 males and 13 females, and hearing impaired adults were 23 males and 50 females. The participant’s age range was 18-58 years old. The lexical semantic test has 44 MCQs in its two alternate forms. Descriptive statistics, Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, U Mann Whitney test, and Kruskal-Wallis test were used for description and analysis of the data.
Results: Statistical comparison of mean scores in two groups of hearing, and hearing impaired showed that mean scores of hearing group was significantly more. Scores of hearing, mild, moderate, and severe groups decreased respectively, but the scores of profound group was slightly more than severe group. The differences between scores of these groups were significant.
Conclusion: According to the findings of this research, we can conclude that hearing impairment can have adverse effects on lexical semantic ability of adult persons. The other important finding of this study was that the more the hearing impairment, the more its adverse effect on lexical semantic ability.