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Audiovisual speech perception in elderly cochlear implant recipients.
Marcia J Hay-McCutcheon1, David B Pisoni, Karen Iler Kirk
1Department of Otolaryngology--Head and Neck Surgery, Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, 46202, USA. mhaymccu@indiana.edu
The Laryngoscope
|October 14, 2005
Summary
Older cochlear implant recipients performed similarly to younger adults in auditory-only speech perception. However, elderly individuals relied more on visual cues for understanding sentences, indicating different processing of visual speech information.
Area of Science:
- Audiology
- Neuroscience
- Gerontology
Background:
- Cochlear implants restore hearing but speech perception varies.
- Auditory and visual information aid speech understanding, especially with hearing loss.
Purpose of the Study:
- To compare speech perception in younger and older cochlear implant (CI) users.
- To assess the impact of auditory and visual information on speech understanding in different age groups.
Main Methods:
- Retrospective review of 34 postlingually deafened adult CI recipients (younger vs. older).
- Analysis of speech perception scores using Consonant-Nucleus-Consonant (CNC), Hearing In Noise sentence Test (HINT), and City University of New York (CUNY) tests.
- Comparison of auditory-only, vision-only, and audiovisual conditions for CUNY tests.
Main Results:
- No significant age-related differences in auditory-only CNC and HINT test performance.
- Older CI users showed greater reliance on combined auditory-visual information for sentence comprehension.
- Preimplantation speechreading scores in younger adults negatively correlated with postimplantation auditory-only performance.
Conclusions:
- Auditory-only speech perception is comparable between younger and older CI recipients on average.
- Significant variability exists in speech perception abilities within and between age groups.
- Elderly CI users process visual speech information differently, relying more on audiovisual integration.