COMPARISON OF MULTICHANNEL TACTILE AIDS AND MULTICHANNEL COCHLEAR IMPLANTS IN CHILDREN WITH PROFOUND HEARING IMPAIRMENTS

Speech perception skills of prelingually deafened children who used th e multichannel Tactaid 7 (n = 10) were compared to those of a matched group of children who used the Nucleus 22 channel cochlear implant (n = 10). Group scores were compared on a closed-set test of word recogni tion and on an open-set test of phrase recognition in the pre-device c ondition and at a post-device interval after an average of 1.5 years o f multichannel device use. The results revealed that the scores of the implant users improved significantly between the pre- and post-device intervals on all measures. Moreover, the scores of the implant users were significantly higher than those of the tactile aid users on all m easures. In contrast, the scores of the tactile aid users showed negli gible change over time, except on a test that evaluated open-set recog nition of phrases with both auditory and visual cues. The results sugg est that children can learn to recognize words and understand speech w ithout lipreading with a multichannel implant, whereas children who us ed the multichannel tactile aid demonstrate limited speech recognition skills only if auditory/tactile cues are combined with lipreading.