Open-set speech recognition in children with a single-channel cochlear implant.
We evaluated the ability of profoundly deaf children using the 3M/House single-channel cochlear implant to understand speech without the aid of speechreading. Fifty-one implanted children over the age of 5 years, who had sufficient cognitive and language skills, were tested using word and sentence stimuli presented in an open-set, auditory-only mode. Fifty-two percent of the children demonstrated some open-set performance on word identification, while 41.5% did so on sentence comprehension. Children who scored open-set had a shorter duration of deafness than those who did not. A larger proportion of children using oral communication demonstrated open-set speech recognition than those using total communication. A multiple regression analysis indicated that communication method accounted for the largest proportion of variability in performance on both the word and sentence tasks. Children achieving open-set auditory recognition, however, included both those using oral communication and those using total communication, children deafened by meningitis and those born deaf, and children with varying durations of deafness.
Berliner
K I
KI
House Ear Institute, Los Angeles, California.
Tonokawa
L L
LL
Dye
L M
LM
House
W F
WF
D000293:Adolescent; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003054:Cochlear Implants; D003638:Deafness / Q000503:physiopathology*; D006801:Humans; D008085:Lipreading; D012044:Regression Analysis; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*