SPEECH-INTELLIGIBILITY OF CHILDREN WITH COCHLEAR IMPLANTS

The speech intelligibility of 18 children with prelingual deafness was examined after using multichannel cochlear implants for an average of three years. Half of the subjects used oral communication and half used total communication. The nine subjects in each group were matched in terms of age at onset of deafness, age implanted, and duration of implant use. Sentences were elicited from the subjects on an imitative basis and played to panels of listeners who were instructed to write down what they thought the subjects had said. Intelligibility was measured in terms of the percentage of words correctly understood in the sentences. The average speech intelligibility score of the children who used oral communication was 48%, which was significantly higher than the average score of 21% of the subjects who used total communication. The range of scores for the subjects who used oral communication was relatively large, with the scores of the subjects with the lowest intelligibility comparable to those of the subjects who used total communication. None of the children who used total communication, however, demonstrated scores similar to those of the subjects with the most intelligible speech.