Speech recognition in children with unilateral and bilateral cochlear implants in quiet and in noise

[摘要] Individuals are increasingly undergoing bilateral cochlear implantation in an attempt tobenefit from binaural hearing. The main aim of the present study was to compare thespeech recognition of children fitted with bilateral cochlear implants, under binaural andmonaural listening conditions, in quiet and in noise. Ten children, ranging in age from 5years 7 months to 15 years 4 months, were tested using the Children's Realistic Index forSpeech Perception (CRISP). All the children were implanted with Nucleus multi-channelcochlear implant systems in sequential operations and used the ACE coding strategybilaterally. The duration of cochlear implant use ranged from 4 years to 8 years 11months for the first implant and 7 months to 3 years 5 months for the second implant.Each child was tested in eight listening conditions, which included testing in the presenceand absence of competing speech. Performance with bilateral cochlear implants was notstatistically better than performance with the first cochlear implant, for both quiet andnoisy listening conditions. A ceiling effect may have resulted in the lack of a significantfinding as the scores obtained during unilateral conditions were already close tomaximum. A positive correlation between the length of use of the second cochlearimplant and speech recognition performance was established. The results of the presentstudy strongly indicated the need for testing paradigms to be devised which are moresensitive and representative of the complex auditory environments in which cochlearimplant users communicate.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University