Use of acoustic cues by children with cochlear implants

This study examined the use of different acoustic cues in auditory perception of consonant and vowel contrasts by profoundly deaf children with a cochlear implant (CI) in comparison to age-matched children and young adults with normal hearing.

A speech sound categorization task in an XAB format was administered to 15 children ages 5-6 with a CI (mean age at implant: 1;8 [years;months]), 20 normal-hearing age-matched children, and 21 normal-hearing adults. Four contrasts were examined: //-/a/, /i/-/i/, /bu/-/pu/, and /fu/-/su/. Measures included phoneme endpoint identification, individual cue reliance, cue weighting, and classification slope.

The children with a CI used the spectral cues in the /fu/-/su/ contrast less effectively than the children with normal hearing, resulting in poorer phoneme endpoint identification and a shallower classification slope. Performance on the other 3 contrasts did not differ significantly. Adults consistently showed steeper classification slopes than the children, but similar cue-weighting patterns were observed in all 3 groups.

Despite their different auditory input, children with a CI appear to be able to use many acoustic cues effectively in speech perception. Most importantly, children with a CI and normal-hearing children were observed to use similar cue-weighting patterns.