COCHLEAR IMPLANTS IN CHILDREN - METHODS AND RESULTS

Selection criteria, basic principles of auditory training, development of an auditory test battery for children and results of 15 children between 4 and 14 years are presented and discussed. To summarize, results range from acoustic attention to tones and sounds and recognition of environmental sounds to the use of supra-segmental and segmental features of speech. Some children are able to recognize words and phrases from a closed list. One of the children is postlingually deafened and has had also a very short duration of deafness before implantation. This child shows better results than the pre and perilingually deaf children. Because of the fact that the patientgroup is small and there are also many intervening variables like age, duration of deafness and use of two different testinstruments, it is difficult to find a relationship between the results and all other variables. The auditory testbattery for children, which consists of seven subtests, measuring acoustic orientation and auditory speech perception on different linguistic levels, is much more suitable for the evaluation of auditory performance for this age group than the auditory testbattery for adults (Eisenwort and Burian 1988).