Faculty Bibliography

This study examined the speech intelligibility of profoundly, prelingually or congenitally deaf children who use hearing aids. Children were 1-15 years old and they were classified into subgroups according to residual hearing (pure-tone averages [PTAs] between 90 and 100 dB HL, 100 and 110 dB HL, or greater than 110 dB HL) and communication mode (either oral or Total Communication [TC]). They read lists of standard sentences which were played back to panels of three naive listeners who were not familiar with the speech of the deaf and who did not know to which subgroup the children belonged. The data revealed a strong significant trend toward higher intelligibility for children with more residual hearing, and a significant trend toward higher intelligibility for users of oral communication than for those who used Total Communication. However, the latter trend was much more pronounced for some ranges of residual hearing than for others, and it may have been partly due to a sampling effect. A third trend showed significantly higher intelligibility levels at older ages, but this was particularly pronounced for children with PTAs between 90 and 100 dB HL, and for the majority of oral communication users (and only a few Total Communication users) with PTAs between 100 and 110 dB HL. These results suggest that the amount of residual hearing (possibly in interaction with the communication mode used by the child) may be an important factor in the development of intelligible speech. $$:

Multichannel cochlear implants (CIs) allow many profoundly deaf children to achieve high levels of speech perception. In order to develop optimal criteria for implantation, it is crucial to test representative samples (or, if possible, full populations) of CI users and compare their results to those of hearing aid (HA) users of the same age and communication mode (oral or total communication) to determine which subgroups of HA users may obtain more perceptual benefit from a CI than from an HA. Word and phoneme identification skills of deaf children who use either HAs or CIs were evaluated and compared. The CI group included all of the prelingually deaf children in the United States who were implanted with the CLARION Multi-Strategy Cochlear Implant during the clinical trial (as of January 1998). Before implantation, the mean scores on the PB-K test (scored phonemically) were lower for prospective CI users than for HA users. However, by 12 to 18 months postimplantation, the average scores for the CI users were higher than those of HA users with residual hearing in the 101- to 110-dB hearing level (HL) range. The CI scores were similar to those of HA users with residual hearing in the 90- to 100-dB HL range

Detailed longitudinal studies of speech perception, speech production and language acquisition have justified a significant change in the demographics of congenitally and prelingually deaf children who receive cochlear implants. A trend toward earlier cochlear implantation has been justified by improvements in measures assessing these areas. To assess the influence of age at implantation on performance, age 5 years was used as a benchmark. Thirty-one children who received a Nucleus cochlear implant and use the SPEAK speech processing strategy and two children who received a Clarion cochlear implant and use the CIS strategy served as subjects. The subjects were divided into three groups based on age at implantation. The groups comprised children implanted before the age of 3 years (n = 14), children implanted between 3 years and 3 years 11 months (n = 11) and those implanted between 4 years and 5 years 3 months (n = 8). The children were further divided according to whether they used oral or total communication. The earlier-implanted groups demonstrated statistically significant improvements on measures of speech perception. Improvements in speech intelligibility as a function of age at implant were seen but did not reach statistical significance. The results of the present study demonstrate that early implantation promotes the acquisition of speaking and listening skills