Chinese tonal language rehabilitation following cochlear implantation in children

Cantonese language rehabilitation in 28 prelingually deaf children who unde rwent cochlear implantation was evaluated. All patients were implanted with multichannel devices and the operations went smoothly. They all had improv ed scores on audiological assessments and speech perception tests. The spee ch evaluation tests included the recognition of sounds, vowels, consonants and tone. Sentence recognition and story comprehension were both improved a fter training for 2 years. Cochlear implantation is a useful measure for th e speech rehabilitation of prelingually profound deaf children when hearing aids are of no benefit. The multichannel implant device is of clinical sig nificance in the rehabilitation of those patients using tonal language.