Speech intelligibility of pediatric cochlear implant recipients with 7 years of device experience

Speech intelligibility of 24 prelingually deaf pediatric cochlear implant (CI) recipients with 84 months of device experience was investigated. Each CI participant's speech samples were judged by a panel of 3 listeners. Intelligibility scores were calculated as the average of the 3 listeners' responses. The average write-down intelligibility score was 71.54% (SD = 29.89), and the average rating-scale intelligibility score was 3.03 points (SD = 1.01). Write-down and rating-scale intelligibility scores were highly correlated (r = .91, p < .001). Linear regression analyses revealed that both age at implantation and different speech-coding strategies contribute to the variability of CI participants' speech intelligibility. Implantation at a younger age and the use of the spectral-peak speech-coding strategy yielded higher intelligibility scores than implantation at an older age and the use of the multipeak speech-coding strategy. These results serve as indices for clinical applications when long-term advancements in spoken-language development are considered for pediatric CI recipients.