Development of audiovisual comprehension skills in prelingually deaf children with cochlear implants.
OBJECTIVE
The present study investigated the development of audiovisual comprehension skills in prelingually deaf children who received cochlear implants.


METHODS
We analyzed results obtained with the Common Phrases (Robbins et al., 1995) test of sentence comprehension from 80 prelingually deaf children with cochlear implants who were enrolled in a longitudinal study, from pre-implantation to 5 years after implantation.


RESULTS
The results revealed that prelingually deaf children with cochlear implants performed better under audiovisual (AV) presentation compared with auditory-alone (A-alone) or visual-alone (V-alone) conditions. AV sentence comprehension skills were found to be strongly correlated with several clinical outcome measures of speech perception, speech intelligibility, and language. Finally, pre-implantation V-alone performance on the Common Phrases test was strongly correlated with 3-year postimplantation performance on clinical outcome measures of speech perception, speech intelligibility, and language skills.


CONCLUSIONS
The results suggest that lipreading skills and AV speech perception reflect a common source of variance associated with the development of phonological processing skills that is shared among a wide range of speech and language outcome measures.
Bergeson
Tonya R
TR
Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, Indiana 46202, USA.
Pisoni
David B
DB
Davis
Rebecca A O
RA
D001307:Auditory Perception; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003054:Cochlear Implants; D003071:Cognition; D003142:Communication; D003638:Deafness / Q000534:rehabilitation*; D005260:Female; D005500:Follow-Up Studies; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D008085:Lipreading; D008297:Male; D013067:Speech Perception; D016896:Treatment Outcome; D014796:Visual Perception