AUDITORY SPEECH-PERCEPTION CAPACITY OF CHILD IMPLANT USERS EXPRESSED AS EQUIVALENT HEARING-LOSS

An imitative test of speech pattern contrast perception (IMSPAC) was a dministered to 76 child hearing aid users and 18 child users of the Nu cleus multichannel cochlear implant. All of the implant users were enr olled in the Central Institute for the Deaf. The hearing aid data prov ided a linear regression function for aided IMSPAC score on unaided th reshold. This function was then used to estimate for each implant user the unaided threshold at which the IMSPAC score of a typical hearing aid user would equal that of the implant user. This quantity, referred to as Equivalent Hearing Loss, averaged 88 dB for the 18 implant user s, with a range of 74 to 113 dB. The results provide support for the c onclusion that a multichannel implant can provide many otherwise very profoundly deaf children with auditory speech perception capacity simi lar to that of severely deaf children who wear hearing aids.