Hearing performance and voice acoustics of cochlear implanted children.

INTRODUCTION: The voice of hearing-impaired individuals has been described extensively, and exhibits abnormalities in quality, articulation and resonance. Having an understanding of the aspects that may have an impact on voice characteristics of cochlear implant users is important for users and for professionals in this field.

OBJECTIVE: To verify the existence of correlation between age, time of device use, voice detection threshold, hearing category score and language category score with acoustic data of voices of cochlear implanted children.

METHODS: Retrospective study. Fifty-one children ranging in age from 3 years to 5 years and 11 months who unilaterally used cochlear implants participated. Acoustic analysis of the sustained vowel/a/, sequential speech and spontaneous speech was performed. The results were correlated with demographic data and hearing test results.

RESULTS: Children with worse voice detection threshold showed higher frequency in the sustained vowel (p≤0.001) and in the spontaneous speech (p≤0.005).

CONCLUSION: There was a correlation between the voice detection threshold and the frequency values of the sustained vowel and spontaneous speech of the studied population.