Speech perception in pre-lingual deaf users of cochlear implant.

BACKGROUND: cochlear implant is a rather processing electronic device in terms of its benefits, as it provides the deaf child with the appropriation of incidental oral language.

AIM: to evaluate the hearing performance of the first 60 children with pre-lingual sensorineural hearing loss who were implanted at the Audiologic Research Centre of the Hospital de Reabilitação de Anomalias Craniofaciais of the University of São Paulo (CPA-HRAC/USP), 16 years after the implementation of the cochlear implant programme.

METHOD: 57 children aged between 9 and 18 years were evaluated using the following speech perception tests: lists of monosyllabic and disyllabic word recognition; lists of meaningless syllables recognition - Consonant Confusion Study - Confuse Program (presented in the System to Deploy Cochlear Nucleus software in its programming unit - version 6.90); lists of sentence recognition and list of words used for the assessment of speech sound perception for children with hearing impairment.

RESULTS: all children achieved satisfactory results with the cochlear implant. In the tests involving the index of phoneme and word recognition, the results were statistically significant for the type of cochlear implant Med-El when compared to the other types of implants.

CONCLUSION: the study indicates that the cochlear implant has brought real benefits for the group of studied children, as it allowed the maximum development of the auditory skills.