Cognitive development in children with cochlear implants: relations to reading and communication.
The purpose of the present article is to present an overview of a set of studies conducted in our own laboratory on cognitive and communicative development in children with cochlear implants (CI). The results demonstrate that children with CIs perform at significantly lower levels on the majority of the cognitive tasks. The exceptions to this trend are tasks with relatively lower demands on phonological processing. A fairly high proportion of the children can reach a level of reading comprehension that matches hearing children, despite the fact that they have relatively poor phonological skills. General working memory capacity is further correlated with the type of questions asked in a referential communication task. The results are discussed with respect to issues related to education and rehabilitation.
Lyxell
Björn
B
The Swedish Institute for Disability Research, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden. Bjorn.Lyxell@liu.se
Sahlén
Birgitta
B
Wass
Malin
M
Ibertsson
Tina
T
Larsby
Birgitta
B
Hällgren
Mathias
M
Mäki-Torkko
Elina
E
D000293:Adolescent; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development; D003054:Cochlear Implants; D003071:Cognition; D003142:Communication; D012048:Correction of Hearing Impairment; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008085:Lipreading; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D019986:Persons with Hearing Disabilities / Q000523:psychology / Q000534:rehabilitation*; D010700:Phonetics; D011571:Psychoacoustics; D011932:Reading; D013067:Speech Perception