SPEECH PERCEPTION ABILITIES IN PRELINGUALLY DEAFENED CHILDREN USING MULTICHANNEL COCHLEAR IMPLANTS

The speech perception abilities of seventeen prelingually- deafened Korean- speaking children with Nucleus multichannel cochlear implant, who had used the device for an average of 2.0 years, were examined on a battery of speech perception tests. All children demonstrated better speech perception skills with the implant than they had in the preimplant condition with hearing aids. The results of correlation analyses revealed that age implanted and duration of deafness were significant in predicting the open- set scores. The results of paired t- tests on open- set measures showed that the mean auditory-visual scores were significantly higher than the mean visual- only scores.When prelingually deafened children were divided into two subgroups depending on their age implanted (before/ after 6 years of age), there were significant group effects on open- and closed- set measures.