Assessment of temporal processing functions in early period cochlear implantation

The purpose of this study is to compare the temporal processing performance of children with cochlear implant (CI) according to the age of implantation and to determine their relation with auditory perception scores.

In this study, 30 cochlear implant users and ten normal hearing children at 9 and 10 years were included. Children with cochlear implants are divided into two groups according to the age of implantation: group I includes participants whose implantation age is between 13 and 35 months (20 children), group II includes participants whose implantation age is between 36 and 45 months (10 children). Individuals were evaluated with random gap detection test (RGDT), duration pattern test (DPT), frequency pattern test (FPT), the Mr. Potato Head task, word recognition, and sentence recognition test.

A significant difference was found between the control and CI groups in temporal processing performance. The temporal processing ability of CI groups was significantly worse than those of normal hearing. Although there was no significant difference among the groups with cochlear implant in terms of temporal processing performance, children who started to use CI at an earlier age showed a tendency of better performance on temporal processing tasks. There was a significant relationship between Daily Sentence Test and FPT, and the Mr. Potato Head task and FPT rev (the score calculated by accepting the reverse patterns correctly). There was a significant relationship between duration of implant use and temporal ordering performance CONCLUSION: In this study, children with CI cannot perform as well as normal-hearing peers on temporal processing tasks, even if they had started to use their CIs at an early age. It is important to evaluate temporal processing in implanted individuals and to guide auditory training considering the evaluation results.