Voice acoustic characteristics of children with late-onset cochlear implantation: Correlation to auditory performance.

Objectives: To study the voice acoustic parameters of congenitally deaf children with delayed access to sounds due to late-onset cochlear implantation and to correlate their voice characteristics with their auditory performance.

Methods: The study included 84 children: a control group consisting of 50 children with normal hearing and normal speech development; and a study group consisting of 34 paediatric cochlear implant (CI) recipients who had suffered profound hearing loss since birth. According to speech recognition scores and pure-tone thresholds, the study group was further subdivided into two subgroups: 24 children with excellent auditory performance and 10 children with fair auditory performance. The mean age at the time of implantation was 3.6 years for excellent auditory performance group and 3.2 years for fair auditory performance group. Voice acoustic analysis was conducted on all study participants.

Results: Analysis of voice acoustic parameters revealed a statistically significant delay in both study groups in comparison to the control group. However, there was no statistically significant difference between the two study groups.

Discussion: Interestingly, in both excellent and fair performance study groups, the gap in comparison to normal hearing children was still present. While late-implanted children performed better on segmental perception (e.g. word recognition), suprasegmental perception (e.g. as demonstrated by objective acoustic voice analysis) did not progress to the same extent.

Conclusion: On the suprasegmental speech performance level, objective acoustic voice measurements demonstrated a significant delay in the suprasegmental speech performance of children with late-onset CI, even those with excellent auditory performance.