Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jan 2, 2026
Systematic Hearing Performance Evaluation Process for Adolescents with Cochlear Implantation at Early Ages
Published on: March 24, 2023
Duration of Processor Use Per Day Is Significantly Correlated With Speech Recognition Abilities in Adults With
Jourdan T Holder1, Nichole C Dwyer, René H Gifford
1Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee.
Objective:
Quantify the relationship between average hours of processor use per day and measures of speech recognition in post-lingually deafened adults with cochlear implants.
Setting:
Cochlear implant (CI) program at a tertiary medical center.
Patients:
Three hundred adult (mean age = 64, 130 women) CI users were included.
Main Outcome Measures:
Correlation analyses were completed for CI-aided speech recognition (Consonant-Nucleus-Consonant [CNC] monosyllables and AzBio sentences) at approximately 12 months post-implantation and average hours of processor use per day, which was extracted from the CI programming software.
Results:
Average processor use was 10.2 hours per day (range, 0.1-22.7), and average speech recognition scores were 49.9 and 61.7% for CNC and AzBio sentence recognition, respectively. We found a strong, significant correlation between hours of processor use per day and consonant-nucleus-consonant (CNC) word recognition (rs = 0.61, p < 0.0001) and AzBio sentence recognition (rs = 0.56, p < 0.0001).
Conclusions:
Results suggest that highest speech recognition outcomes are correlated with greater than 10 hours of CI use per day. Further research is needed to assess the causal link between daily CI use and speech recognition abilities.
