Intelligibility of hearing impaired children as judged by their parents: A comparison between children using cochlear implants and children using hearing aids

ObjectivesThe aim of this study was to determine the intelligibility of prelingually deaf children with cochlear implants (CI) as judged by their own parents, and to compare these results with prelingually hearing impaired children using hearing aids (HA) and normally hearing (NH) children. The authors hypothesised that subjects using conventional hearing aids would have poorer intelligibility judgements compared to NH and CI children.MethodologyThis is a comparative study of 24 prelingually deaf CI children (m.a. 8.3 years), 24 prelingually hearing impaired HA children (m.a. 9.0 years) and 25 NH children. Recorded speech samples at word-, sentence- and story-level were perceptually judged by two speech pathologists and the child's main caregiver (the mother in most cases) using a five-point hierarchical scale. In addition, the sample of each child was transcribed by the child's main caregiver. The investigators counted and determined a percentage of words correctly understood.ResultsThe judgements of the speech pathologists and the transcriptions of the mothers were not different between the CI and NH children, although the mothers tended to judge their CI child to be less intelligible. The HA children on the other hand, showed a mean intelligibility inferior to NH and CI children, as demonstrated by the judgements of the mothers and speech pathologists as well as by the percentages of correctly identified words by the mothers.ConclusionThe intelligibility of the prelingually deaf CI children is very close to the intelligibility of NH children, while the HA children still show a decreased mean intelligibility.