Current research with cochlear implants in adults and children

Abstract

Much of the early work at Haskins Laboratories, under the direction of Frank Cooper, focused on the development and evaluation of prosthetic devices. Near the end of his life, Frank Cooper again evidenced an interest in a prosthetic device—the cochlear implant. Part of Frank’s interest stemmed from the fact that the most commonly used cochlear implant uses a scheme for stimulation which has a historical antecedent in the Peterson and Cooper (1957) peak-picking, vocoder (which, in turn, was based on the pattern playback). The other part of Frank’s interest grew out of the many inter-related studies at Haskins Laboratories on deafness, phonetic processing, memory, and reading. In our last conversation, Frank quizzed me at length on cochlear implants in children—were the children intelligible, did they understand speech, did they acquire oral language, and did they read at grade level? In this talk I will continue my conversation with Frank and summarize recent research with cochlear implants in adults and children.