The effects of listening conditions on sentence judgement and listening effort in school-aged children with bilateral cochlear implants in a dual-task paradigm

Objectives: This study investigated the impact of bilateral cochlear implantation on auditory-language processing abilities and listening effort for deaf children in quiet and noise conditions using a dual-task paradigm. Methods: Seventeen children with bilateral cochlear implants (BiCI group), 17 children with unilateral cochlear implants (UniCI group), and 17 children with normal hearing (NH group) participated in this study, and they ranged from 7 to 14 years at the testing. Dual tasks involved judging the semantic plausibility of auditorily presented sentences under quiet and noise conditions (primary task) and responding in a digit judgment task in which two digits were visually presented on the screen (secondary task). Results: On the dual task, all children performed better when tested in quiet rather than in noise. On the sentence judgement task, BiCI group performed with higher accuracy and faster processing speed than UniCI group with and without noise. On the digit task, NH group showed significantly quicker response times than BiCI and UniCI groups. Conclusion: BiCI group processed sentence semantically more accurately and faster than UniCI group with the same listening effort. These findings suggest that bilateral cochlear implantation is more beneficial than unilateral cochlear implantation in deaf children in improving auditory-language processing abilities.