Relationships among types of speech intelligibility in pediatric users of cochlear implants

Twenty pediatric users of cochlear implants were administered three tests o f speech intelligibility: (1) a test of contrast perception intelligibility , (2) a test of contrast production intelligibility, and (3) a test of prod uction sentence intelligibility. Sixty adults with normal hearing served as listener judges for the two speech production tasks, and percent correct s cores were generated for each of the three tasks. Correlational analyses sh owed significant correlations among overall scores for the three tasks. How ever, scores for individual feature classes from the contrast perception ta sk were not correlated with their corresponding contrast production feature class scores, and only some of the feature class scores were correlated si gnificantly with sentence intelligibility. We conclude that although these three types of intelligibility are related at a gross level, relationships are more tenuous at finer levels of analysis, suggesting that the separate skills may need to be addressed separately in remediation. Educational obje ctives: As a result of this activity, the participant will be able to diffe rentiate various methods for assessing speech intelligibility and describe the relationships among different types of speech intelligibility in pediat ric users of cochlear implants. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights r eserved.