Speech perception studies in the first year of usage of a multiple electrode cochlear implant by prelingual patients

Abstract

Vowel and consonant confusion studies, in the electrical alone (E), visual alone (V), and electrical plus visual (EV) conditions, and three Minimal Auditory Capabilities (MAC) subtests, in the E condition, were conducted on three prelingual patients using a multiple electrode cochlear implant. For vowels, the one‐dimensional solution from multidimensional scaling analysis for the E condition was interpreted as vowel length, and the one‐dimensional and two‐dimensional solutions for the V and EV conditions as visual parameters. The constant results from information transmission analysis for the E condition indicated poor transmission of all articulatory features, and minimal differences between transmission scores for the V and EV conditions were recorded. For the MAC subtests, two patients scored significantly above chance for male‐female speaker identification, one patient for one syllable‐two syllable identification, but no patients for spondee same‐different discrimination. The results suggested that these prelingual patients did not fully utilize the information provided by a multiple electrode implant during the first year of use.