Categorization of everyday sounds by cochlear implanted children

Auditory categorization is an important process in the perception and understanding of everyday sounds. The use of cochlear implants (CIs) may affect auditory categorization and result in poor abilities. The current study was designed to compare how children with normal hearing (NH) and children with CIs categorize a set of everyday sounds. We tested 24 NH children and 24 children with CI on a free-sorting task of 18 everyday sounds corresponding to four a priori categories: nonlinguistic human vocalizations, environmental sounds, musical sounds, and animal vocalizations. Multiple correspondence analysis revealed considerable variation within both groups of child listeners, although the human vocalizations and musical sounds were similarly categorized. In contrast to NH children, children with CIs categorized some sounds according to their acoustic content rather than their associated semantic information. These results show that despite identification deficits, children with CIs are able to categorize environmental and vocal sounds in a similar way to NH children, and are able to use categorization as an adaptive process when dealing with everyday sounds.