The performance on degraded listening task in children with cochlear implants

Objectives: The present study investigated first, how children with cochlear implants (CIs) perform on a degraded listening task by context conditions compared to children with normal hearing (NH), and second, whether a degraded listening task correlate with receptive vocabulary. Methods: The study included children between 4 and 10 years of age, 15 with CIs, and 15 age-matched NH. We administrated a degraded listening task, which consisted of two different context conditions, high predictability and low predictability. Twoway mixed ANOVA, 2 × 2 ANCOVA and Pearson correlation were used to analyze the data. Results: There were significant differences between the 2 groups and the 2 context conditions on degraded listening task scores. Also, there was significant interaction effect between group and context conditions. These differences and interaction effect remained statistically significant even after controlling for receptive vocabulary score. No correlation was found between the performances on receptive vocabulary and degraded listening tasks. In the CIs, the high predictability score was negatively correlated with age of implantation. Conclusion: The results of this study showed that children with CIs have more difficulties using acoustic-phonetic knowledge than using top-down knowledge. They also demonstrated declined ability to utilize linguistic contexts and long-term knowledge. The earlier exposure to speech sounds may have positive impacts on language processing skills in children with CIs.