ACQUISITION OF SPEECH BY CHILDREN WHO HAVE PROLONGED COCHLEAR IMPLANTEXPERIENCE

The four purposes of this investigation were to assess whether childre n acquire intelligible speech following prolonged cochlear-implant exp erience and examine their speech error patterns, to examine how age at implantation influences speech acquisition, to assess how speech prod uction and speech perception skills relate, and to determine whether c ochlear implant recipients who formerly used simultaneous communicatio n (speech and manually coded English) begin to use speech without sign to communicate. Twenty-eight prelinguistically deafened children who use a Nucleus cochlear implant were assigned to one of the three age g roups, according to age at implantation: 2-5 yrs (N = 12), 5-8 yrs (N = 9), and 8-15 yrs (N = 7). All subjects had worn a cochlear implant f or at least 24 mos, and an average of 36 mos. All subjects used simult aneous communication at the time of implantation. Subjects performed b oth imitative and structured spontaneous sampling speech tasks. The re sults permit the following conclusions: (a) children who have used a c ochlear implant for at least 2 yrs acquire some intelligible speech; ( b) children who receive a cochlear implant before the age of 5 yrs app ear to show greater benefit in their speech production skills than chi ldren who are older, at least after a minimum of 2 yrs of use; (c) chi ldren who recognize more speech while wearing their cochlear implants are likely to speak more intelligibly; and, (d) signing does not disap pear from a child's communication mode following implantation.