Abstract
Auditory categorization is an important process in the perception and understanding of everyday sounds. The use of cochlear implants (CIs) may affect auditory categorization and result in poor abilities. The current study was designed to compare how children with normal hearing (NH) and children with CIs categorize a set of everyday sounds. We tested 24 NH children and 24 children with CI on a free-sorting task of 18 everyday sounds corresponding to four a priori categories: nonlinguistic human vocalizations, environmental sounds, musical sounds, and animal vocalizations. Multiple correspondence analysis revealed considerable variation within both groups of child listeners, although the human vocalizations and musical sounds were similarly categorized. In contrast to NH children, children with CIs categorized some sounds according to their acoustic content rather than their associated semantic information. These results show that despite identification deficits, children with CIs are able to categorize environmental and vocal sounds in a similar way to NH children, and are able to use categorization as an adaptive process when dealing with everyday sounds.
Highlights
When an infant is identified as having profound-to-total bilateral hearing loss, the surgical implantation of cochlear implants (CIs) is envisaged as a means of restoring his or her access to auditory information
We provide data on the verbal identification of sounds by the implanted children, this approach does have limitations when applied to children with limited verbal capacities
We compared the frequency of usage of these “common” words between children with CIs and controls and found that the average frequency of word usage was 25% lower in children with CIs than in normal hearing (NH) counterparts (p < 0.05, bootstrap). These results demonstrate that there is a considerable difference between children with CIs and NH children in the use of the vocabulary
Summary
When an infant is identified as having profound-to-total bilateral hearing loss, the surgical implantation of cochlear implants (CIs) is envisaged as a means of restoring his or her access to auditory information. The auditory information provided by the implant is spectrally degraded[5] and lacks the fine spectrotemporal information that is crucial to certain aspects of speech comprehension - most notably the perception of prosodic information[6,7,8,9] This means that other aspects of auditory perception are problematic for CI users, such as the identification and recognition of environmental and musical sounds. Whilst CIs may enhance users’ awareness of their immediate auditory environment[10], a substantial deficit remains in the perception and identification of specific environmental sounds[11,12,13], that is, those not classified as speech or music This deficit has a negative impact on how CI users interact with their environment, and it is important for more studies to be conducted on this topic. Owing to a lack of standardized protocols for assessing auditory performance and the use of different evaluation procedures
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