Audiovisual Spoken Word Recognition by Children with Cochlear Implants

Area of Science:

• Audiology
• Speech-Language Pathology
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Prelingually deafened children often use cochlear implants (CIs) for hearing restoration.
• Understanding speech involves integrating auditory and visual cues, particularly for CI users.
• Lexical effects can influence speech recognition, especially in challenging listening conditions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how children with CIs integrate visual lipreading with auditory cues for speech perception.
• To examine lexical effects on word recognition in isolation and in sentences.
• To assess the relationship between speech recognition, presentation format, and language knowledge in CI users.

Main Methods:

• Fifteen children with CIs completed auditory-only and audiovisual speech perception tests.
• Spoken word recognition was assessed using isolated words (LNT) and key words in sentences (AV-LNST).
• Lexical characteristics were controlled, and receptive vocabulary was measured.

Main Results:

• Audiovisual speech perception significantly outperformed auditory-only and visual-only conditions.
• Lexical effects impacted isolated word recognition but not sentence recognition.
• Strong correlations were found between auditory/audiovisual word recognition and language knowledge.

Conclusions:

• Children with CIs gain substantial benefits from audiovisual speech integration.
• Audiovisual speech perception testing is recommended for evaluating CI outcomes.
• Language knowledge is a critical factor in speech recognition for CI users.