Outcomes and achievement of students who grew up with access to cochlear implants

To provide long-term speech perception and production, educational, vocational, and achievement outcome data for pediatric cochlear implant recipients.

This is a retrospective study using consecutive referrals of prelingually, profoundly deaf children at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics.

Twenty-seven prelingually deaf young adults who received a cochlear implant between the ages of 2 and 12 years participated. Outcome measures included device-use information, perceptual information, reading results for all participants and educational achievement results for 17 of 27 participants, educational placement information/vocational information for all students, as well as a comparison of the child's educational/vocational outcome with that of the parent's educational/vocational outcome.

Speech perception and production scores were highly correlated. Achievement test results indicated that scores were within 1 SD from normative data based on hearing individuals. Over 50% of the college-age eligible students enrolled in college. This initial group of implant users had a nonuse rate of 11% in the first 3 years. Eighty-nine percent of the users maintained full-time use for 7 years, and 71% of this group have maintained full-time use to date.

This cohort of cochlear implant users compared favorably with their hearing peers on academic achievement measures. Although there was a wide distribution of educational and vocational outcomes, the children tended to follow the educational/vocational patterns of their parents. As age of implantation decreases, it will be important to compare achievement outcomes of this first generation with those of subsequent generations of cochlear implant users.