Outcomes of Cochlear Implantation in Pediatrics

Tomblin JB et al.1997, Svirsky MA, 2004 reported that the early restoration of auditory ability by cochlear implants significantly improve the commu¬nication skills, albeit with varied results. Thoutenhoofd E 2005 concluded that while most children with cochlear implants become able to attend school regularly, other remain with significantly limited verbal communication skills Earlier implantation for children with a congenital profound hearing loss appeared to provide improved potential for developing speech perception. which improved steadily with implant experience. The speech perception can be defined as the process of imposing a meaningful perceptual experience from meaningless speech input, wich may be thought of involving a number of components as: detection, discrimination, identification, attention, memory and closure . In the field of aural rehabilitation, speech perception assessment has an important and a critical role to select the signal processing strategy, to adjust the signal processor and to determine if appropriate benefit has been achived . Young children,being considered apart of the language limited,difficult-to test population, efforts were directed towards construction of special hearing test to suit their reduced verbal language(Mc Lauchlin,1980). The early speech test(EST) is one of these tests,which use low -verbal materials. The early speech test is one of the closed-set response speech discrimination tests,using object identification technique.It was carefully designed for estimation of speech perception abilities in very young children who have extremely low verbal abilities. Most studies on the impact of cochlear implants have focused on clinical assessments of efficacy (hearing and speech skills, and auditory thresholds). It is not clear how much clinical measures of efficacy (speech, hearing, and language measures) truly show the effectiveness of cochlear implants in general contexts (such as performance at home, at school, and in social settings). Vidas S et al 1992 reported that there is evidence that clinical assessment results do not correlate with performance in unstructured settings, these measures are only part for assessments of cochlear implant efficacy. There are questionnaires that investigate the expectations of parents (Thoutenhoofd E 2005, Vaccari C, Marschark M. 1997, Spilker B, Revicki D.1996) their satisfaction level with implant, the stresses in this process8, and cochlear implant user and family quality of life . * The Meaningful Use of Speech Scale (MUSS) questionnaire was used to analyze and measure speech skills (Nascimento et al 1997)and allows the examiner to evaluate a child skills in meaningful real world situation.