Verbal Fluency in Prelingually Deaf, Early Implanted Children and Adolescents With Cochlear Implants

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Linguistics
• Audiology

Background:

• Verbal fluency tasks measure word retrieval from the mental lexicon.
• Investigating differences in verbal fluency between cochlear implant (CI) users and normal-hearing (NH) peers is crucial for understanding cognitive processing in CI users.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compare phonological and semantic verbal fluency in children and adolescents with cochlear implants (CIs) versus normal-hearing (NH) peers.
• To examine differences in word retrieval clustering and time course between the two groups.

Main Methods:

• Twenty-eight child and adolescent CI users (ages 9-17) and 33 NH peers completed verbal fluency, nonverbal intelligence, speech perception, and verbal short-term/working memory assessments.
• Verbal fluency tests were analyzed for total words, interval word generation, initial word latency, cluster counts, cluster size, and switch frequency.

Main Results:

• CI users generated fewer words than NH peers across both phonological and semantic fluency tasks.
• CI users exhibited slower initial word retrieval (latency) and produced fewer clusters and switches during phonological tasks.
• Speech perception and verbal working memory scores correlated more strongly with verbal fluency in CI users than in NH peers.

Conclusions:

• Cochlear implant users demonstrate poorer phonological and semantic verbal fluency compared to normal-hearing peers.
• Verbal fluency in CI users is significantly associated with their speech perception and verbal working memory abilities.
• Findings suggest that CI users may experience deficits in the efficient retrieval of phonological and semantic information from long-term lexical memory.