Background: One of the most consistent findings reported in the paediatric cochlear implant (CI) literature is the heterogeneity of language performance observed more in grammatical morphology than in lexicon or pragmatics. As most of the corpus studies addressing these issues have been conducted in English, it is unclear whether their results can…

Speaking intelligibly is an important achievement in children's language development. How far do congenitally severe-to-profound hearing-impaired children who received a cochlear implant (CI) in the first two years of their life advance on the path to intelligibility in comparison to children with typical hearing (NH)? Spontaneous speech samples…

Purpose: Phoneme categorization (PC) for voice onset time and second formant transition was studied in adult cochlear implant (CI) users with early-onset deafness and hearing controls. Method: Identification and discrimination tasks were administered to 30 participants implanted before 4 years of age, 21 participants implanted after 7 years of…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between speech recognition benefit derived from the addition of a hearing aid (HA) to the nonimplanted ear (i.e., bimodal benefit) and spectral modulation detection (SMD) performance in the nonimplanted ear in a large clinical sample. An additional purpose was to investigate…

Purpose: Weighting of acoustic cues for perceiving placeof-articulation speech contrasts was measured to determine the separate and interactive effects of age and use of cochlear implants (CIs). It has been found that adults with normal hearing (NH) show reliance on fine-grained spectral information (e.g., formants), whereas adults with CIs show…

This work presents an analysis of the intonation competence in a group of Italian children with cochlear implant (CI). Early cochlear implantation plays a crucial role in language development for children who were born deaf in that it favours the acquisition of complex aspects of language, such as the intonation structure. A story-generation task,…

Recent evidence suggests that deaf children with CIs exposed to nonnative sign language from hearing parents can attain age-appropriate vocabularies in both sign and spoken language. It remains to be explored whether deaf children with CIs who are exposed to early nonnative sign language, but only up to implantation, also benefit from this input…

Purpose: Audiology clinics have a need for a nonlinguistic test for assessing speech scores for patients using hearing aids or cochlear implants. One such test, the Spectral-Temporally Modulated Ripple Test Lite for computeRless Measurement (SLRM), has been developed for use in clinics, but it, as well as the related Spectral-Temporally Modulated…

Purpose: Using naturalistic synthesized speech, we determined the relative importance of acoustic cues in voice gender and age perception in cochlear implant (CI) users. Method: We investigated 28 CI users' abilities to utilize fundamental frequency (F0) and timbre in perceiving voice gender (Experiment 1) and vocal age (Experiment 2).…

Purpose: Depicting the development pattern of vowel perception for children with normal hearing (NH) and cochlear implants (CIs) would be useful for clinicians and school teachers to monitor children's auditory rehabilitation. The study was to investigate the development of Mandarin Chinese vowel perception for Mandarin Chinese native-speaking…

Purpose: Cochlear implants (CIs) transmit a degraded version of the acoustic input to the listener. This impacts the perception of harmonic pitch, resulting in deficits in the perception of voice features critical to speech prosody. Such deficits may relate to changes in how children with CIs (CCIs) learn to produce vocal emotions. The purpose of…

Purpose: This study sought to evaluate the effects of common hearing aid microphone technologies on speech recognition and listening effort, and to evaluate potential predictive factors related to microphone benefits for school-age children with hearing loss in a realistic listening situation. Method: Children (n = 17, ages 10-17 years) with…

Purpose: This study aimed to evaluate the effects of aging and cochlear implant (CI) on psychoacoustic and speech recognition abilities and to assess the relative contributions of psychoacoustic and demographic factors to speech recognition of older CI (OCI) users. Method: Twelve OCI users, 12 older acoustic-hearing (OAH) listeners age-matched to…

This exploratory study examined the usage of speech recognition (SR) technology by students with high incidence disabilities in grades 4-8 and student and teacher perceptions of using SR as part of the writing process. The study also examined factors contributing to students' use of SR and barriers to using this technology. Results indicated that…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the relation between lexical knowledge and phonological awareness performance of children with cochlear implants. Method: Thirty children with cochlear implants (aged 5-7 years), 30 children with normal hearing matched for age, and 30 children with normal hearing matched for vocabulary size…