Language development in profoundly deaf children with cochlear implants

Although cochlear implants improve the ability of profoundly deaf children to understand speech, critics claim that the published literature does not document even a single case of a child who has dec eloped a linguistic syst em based on input from an implant. Thus, it is of clinical and scientific i mportance to determine whether cochlear implants facilitate the development of English language skills. The English language skills of prelingually de af children with cochlear implants were measured before and after implantat ion. We found that the rate of language development after implantation exce eded that expected from unimplanted deaf children (p < .001) and was simila r to that of children with normal hearing. Despite a large amount of indivi dual variability, the best performers in the implanted group seem to be dev eloping an oral linguistic system based largely on auditory input obtained from a cochlear implant.