Effect of cochlear implantation on nasality in post-lingually deafened adults

The present study addresses the effect of cochlear implantation on nasality in 21 post-lingually deafened Dutch subjects. All subjects received the Nucleus 22 implant (MSP version). Speech recordings were made pre-implantation and 3 and 12 months post-implantation with the implant switched on and off. Nasality measurements were performed on a standard text and on two sentences without nasal phonemes. The results show that post-lingual deafness in individuals can result in a deviant degree of nasality in speech production. However, the nasalance value of 86% of the subjects of our study fell within the normative range defined as the mean +/- 2 standard deviations of the normal population. After implantation we found no statistically significant effect of implant use. However, individual nasality values outside the normative range may improve. Furthermore, 12 months post-implantation we found a significant decrease in the variability of the nasalance values obtained for two sentences without nasal phonemes.