Lexical discrimination and age at implantation.

Abstract

Recent research suggests that prelingually deafened children implanted at an early age may obtain greater speech perception and language benefits than those children implanted at a later age. This investigation examined word recognition and lexical discrimination in pediatric cochlear implant users as a function of age at implantation. Two groups of prelingually deafened children who used the Nucleus multichannel cochlear implant participated in this study. The first group contained children who received their device between the ages of 2–5 years, and the second contained children who were implanted between the ages of 6–9 years. Speech perception performance was evaluated using a new measure, the Lexical Neighborhood Test, a traditional measure of word recognition, the PBK, and a measure of receptive language abilities (the PPVT or the Reynell Developmental Language Scales). Children implanted at a younger age had better word recognition performance and were better able to identify lexically difficult words (i.e., those that occur infrequently and have many other phonemically similar words with which they can be confused). Correlations with vocabulary and language performance will also be reported. [Work supported by NIDCD DC00064.]