Abstract
At the present time, there is no question that cochlear implants (CIs) work and often work very well in quiet listening conditions for many profoundly deaf children and adults. The speech and language outcomes data published over the last two decades document quite extensively the clinically significant benefits of CIs. Although there now is a large body of evidence supporting the “efficacy” of CIs as a medical intervention for profound hearing loss in both children and adults, there still remain a number of challenging unresolved clinical and theoretical issues that deal with the “effectiveness” of CIs in individual patients that have not yet been successfully resolved. In this paper, we review recent findings on learning and memory, two central topics in the field of cognition that have been seriously neglected in research on CIs. Our research findings on sequence learning, memory and organization processes, and retrieval strategies used in verbal learning and memory of categorized word lists suggests that basic domain-general learning abilities may be the missing piece of the puzzle in terms of understanding the cognitive factors that underlie the enormous individual differences and variability routinely observed in speech and language outcomes following cochlear implantation.
Highlights
For a number of years, my colleagues and I have been on a mission to understand and explain the reasons for the enormous individual differences and variability in speech and language outcomes following cochlear implantation in adults and children
We review an area of research investigating the “Hebb repetition effect” that provides additional evidence for understanding deficits in serial memory and learning and language outcomes (The “Hebb Effect” and Sequence Repetition Learning)
In the Section “Verbal Learning and Memory Processes,” we describe some recent findings on verbal learning and memory in prelingually deaf longterm cochlear implants (CIs) users obtained with the California Verbal Learning Test (CVLT-II; Delis et al, 2000), a well-known and widely used neuropsychological assessment instrument that provides information about the control processes and organizational strategies that individuals use in free recall of categorized word lists (Chandramouli et al, Manuscript in preparation)
Summary
For a number of years, my colleagues and I have been on a mission to understand and explain the reasons for the enormous individual differences and variability in speech and language outcomes following cochlear implantation in adults and children. We have argued that the individual differences routinely observed at all implant centers around the world are not mysterious, anomalous or idiopathic in nature but instead reflect differences and natural sources of variability in more basic elementary building blocks of cognition (Pisoni et al, 2008). These cognitive factors include the early registration, sensory encoding, storage, rehearsal, retrieval, and processing of phonological and lexical representations of spoken words in speech perception and spoken language processing tasks. In our search for underlying process-based explanations of individual differences, we have focused our research efforts on issues related to learning and memory, two central topics in cognition that have been neglected in the field of cochlear implantation
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