Abstract
Cochlear implants (CIs) are the most successful treatment for severe-to-profound deafness in children. However, speech outcomes with a CI often lag behind those of normally-hearing children. Some authors have attributed these deficits to the takeover of the auditory temporal cortex by vision following deafness, which has prompted some clinicians to discourage the rehabilitation of pediatric CI recipients using visual speech. We studied this cross-modal activity in the temporal cortex, along with responses to auditory speech and non-speech stimuli, in experienced CI users and normally-hearing controls of school-age, using functional near-infrared spectroscopy. Strikingly, CI users displayed significantly greater cortical responses to visual speech, compared with controls. Importantly, in the same regions, the processing of auditory speech, compared with non-speech stimuli, did not significantly differ between the groups. This suggests that visual and auditory speech are processed synergistically in the temporal cortex of children with CIs, and they should be encouraged, rather than discouraged, to use visual speech.
Highlights
A cochlear implant (CI) is a neuroprosthetic device that is surgically implanted to partially restore the sensation of hearing in individuals with severe-to-profound deafness and is the therapy of choice for children with congenital and early-onset deafness
Significant activation (q < 0.05, false discovery rate (FDR) corrected) was observed in temporal brain regions in response to auditory speech in both groups. This was limited to two channels in the right hemisphere (RH) in NH listeners, with a greater number of significantly activated channels observed in the CI group in both cerebral hemispheres
We aimed to extend these findings to a pediatric sample of NH and CI listeners
Summary
A cochlear implant (CI) is a neuroprosthetic device that is surgically implanted to partially restore the sensation of hearing in individuals with severe-to-profound deafness and is the therapy of choice for children with congenital and early-onset deafness. Most CI recipients perform very well with their CIs, speech skills are worse in CI children, compared with their age-matched peers (Holt and Svirsky, 2008; Murphy et al, 2011). It has been shown in adult CI users that cortical. The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between speech understanding and cortical responses in children with CIs and normally-hearing (NH) subjects These were measured using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), a CI-safe, and child-friendly optical neuroimaging technique (Sevy et al, 2010; Quaresima et al, 2012; Saliba et al, 2016; Harrison and Hartley, 2019). In the temporal cortex, we examined three different factors that may correlate with speech perception in CI recipients: responsiveness to visual speech, auditory speech, and non-speech sounds
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