Speech discrimination and intelligibility: outcome of deaf children fitted with hearing aids or cochlear implants

We retrospectively studied outcome of a sample of 36 congenitally deaf children who were fitted with either a conventional hearing aid (HA, N = 14) or a cochlear implant (CI, N = 22), and who received many years of audio-phonatory training by our multi-disciplinary team. In order to rate speech discrimination perception, we developed a new metric of speech discrimination performance based on several existing discrimination tests for the French language. Speech perception skills were measured with and without lip-reading cues. We also studied the evolution of auditory capacity in real-life situations, and the evolution of the intelligibility of spoken language during a five year period. To rate auditory capacity and speech intelligibility, we used commonly used metrics: CAP and SIR. During the five successive years of observation, CAP and SIR scores improve for both the HA and CI children. Improvement, however, is more pronounced for the CI children. At the end of the 5-years period, CAP and SIR scores of CI children are significantly higher than those of HA children. Our study is one of few that evaluates outcome of HA and CI fitting with age matched congenitally deaf children anno 2000.