SPEECH-PERCEPTION ABILITIES OF ADULT AND PEDIATRIC NUCLEUS IMPLANT RECIPIENTS USING THE SPECTRAL PEAK (SPEAK) CODING STRATEGY

A series of 73 postlinguistically deafened adults and 34 prelinguistic ally deafened children were evaluated with the Spectral Peak (SPEAK) c oding strategy of the Nucleus 22-channel cochlear implant. The adults who received consecutive implants demonstrated rapid acquisition of op en-set speech recognition skills in the initial postoperative period, Group mean sentence recognition improved to 53.5% (n = 52) after 2 wee ks, 62.1% (n = 55) after 7 month, 69.8% (n = 57) after 3 months, and 7 4.4% (n = 42) after 6 months of use, At the 6-month evaluation interva l, 43% of subjects scored greater than 90% on sound-alone sentence rec ognition in quiet and only one patient (2.4%) scored less than 10%. Me an monosyllabic word recognition was 35.6% after 6 months of use. The 34 prelinguistically deafened children were converted from the Multipe ak strategy to Spectral Peak strategy at four large pediatric implant centers. After 6 months of using the new coding strategy, the children demonstrated significant improvements in their speech perception abil ities.