Speech intelligibility of pediatric cochlear implant recipients with 7 years of device experience

Speech intelligibility of 24 prelingually deaf pediatric cochlear implant (CI). recipients with 84 months of device experience was investigated. Each CI speech samples were judged by a panel of 3 listeners. Intelligibility participant responses. The average scores were calculated as the average of the 3 listeners write-down intelligibility score was 71.54% (SD = 29.89), and the average rating-scale intelligibility score was 3.03 points (SD = 1.01). Write-down and rating-scale intelligibility scores were highly correlated (r = .91, p < .001). Linear regression analyses revealed that both age at implantation and different speech-coding strategies contribute to the variability of CI participants' speech intelligibility. Implantation at a younger age and the use of the spectral-peak speech-coding strategy yielded higher intelligibility scores than implantation at an older age and the use of the multipeak speech-coding strategy. These results serve as indices for clinical applications when long-term advancements in spoken-language development are considered for pediatric CI recipients.