Information-processing skills of deaf children with cochlear implants: some new process measures of performance

Recent findings on learning, memory and cognitive processes in deaf children following cochlear implantation are reviewed. The contribution of demographic factors is discussed and the results of several studies using "process" measures of performance are presented. In the first study, results from an investigation of the "Stars" showed that the exceptionally good implant users differed from the low performers in several important ways reflecting their ability to rapidly encode sound patterns into phonological representations. In the second set of studies, several new measures of information-processing performance are reported. Speaking rate, a measure shown in other populations to correlate well with an individual's verbal rehearsal speed for items in immediate memory was found to be strongly correlated with measures of a child's immediate memory capacity as well as open-set spoken word recognition scores. Additional evidence revealed atypical reproductive memory spans for auditory as well as visual sequences. Deaf children with cochlear implants also showed less benefit from simple repetition of a familiar sequence than age-matched normal-hearing children. Variation in children's success with cochlear implants reflects differences in the operation of elementary information-processing skills used in a wide range of language-processing tasks that draw on phonological coding and verbal rehearsal processes.