Psycholinguistic abilities in cochlear implant and hearing impaired children

BackgroundMany congenitally sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) children and cochlear implant (CI) recipients develop near-normal language skills. However, there is a wide variation in individual outcomes following cochlear implantation, or using hearing aids. Some CI recipients or Hearing aids users never develop useable speech and oral language skills. The causes of this enormous variation in outcomes are only partly understood at the present time. So, the aim of this study was to assess the psycholinguistic skills in Arabic speaking children with either SNHL or CI in comparison to normal controls in order to estimate the nature and extent of any specific deficit in these children that could explain the different prognostic results of language intervention.Subjects and methodsThree groups were selected, according to Language test, Pure tone audiometry (PTA) & Auditory brain stem response (ABR). Group I included fourteen children with severe and/or severe to profound SNHL aided with proper hearing aids. Group II consisted of fourteen children with CI (MED-EL and Nucleus) and group III included fourteen children with normal hearing. Receptive, Expressive and total language quotients were calculated using the Arabic Language test. Assessment of psycholinguistic abilities was done using the Arabic version of the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic abilities.ConclusionHI individuals have poor auditory short-term memory (A-STM) in comparison to normal hearing individuals. Also, HI individuals have visual short-term memory (V-STM) better than normal hearing individuals. So, multisensory training is needed both in therapy sessions and classrooms with more focus on visual stimuli.