Factors affecting speech perception improvement post-implantation in congenitally deaf adults

Abstract

Objectives: To identify factors pre-implantation associated with post-implantation speech perception improvement in the adult congenitally deaf population.

Design: Forty four adult cochlear implant (CI) patients who had a severe to profound hearing loss from birth were identified from this centre’s database. Eight pre-implantation factors: speech intelligibility, pre-implantation hearing levels, communication mode, pre-implantation speech perception scores, progression of hearing loss, age at implantation, hearing aid use pre-implantation and gender were recorded during the cochlear implant assessment process. These factors were investigated to determine their effect on speech perception improvement post-implantation. The outcome measures were the improvement in scores for the BKB sentence test and CUNY sentence test with lip-reading after implantation. In the final analysis 26 patients were included in the CUNY analysis, 30 in the BKB analysis.

Results: Speech Intelligibility Rating, pre-implantation hearing levels and communication mode were shown to be significantly associated with improvements in speech perception post-implantation.

Conclusion: Three factors were identified that affected speech perception improvement post-implantation: speech intelligibility, pre-implantation hearing levels and communication mode. These factors can be used to counsel CI patients regarding potential speech perception improvements from cochlear implantation, although these are based on average data and may not reflect individual performance.

More information

Identifiers

ORCID for Helen Cullington: orcid.org/0000-0002-5093-2020

Catalogue record

Export record

Altmetrics