Speech Production Quality of Cochlear Implant Users with Respect to Duration and Onset of Hearing Loss

Purpose: To assess whether postlingual onset and shorter duration of deafness before cochlear implant (CI) provision predict higher speech intelligibility results of CI users.Methods: For an objective judgement of speech intelligibility, we used an automatic speech recognition system computing the word recognition rate (WR) of 50 adult CI users and 50 age-matched control individuals. All subjects were recorded reading a standardized text. Subjects were divided into three groups: pre- or perilingual deafness (A), both>2 years before implantation, postlingual deafness2 years before implantation (C).Results: CI users with short duration of postlingual deafness (B) had a significantly higher WR (median 74%) than CI users with long duration of postlingual deafness (C; 68%,p
Source: ORL - Category: ENT & OMF Source Type: research