Vowel Production in Persian Deaf Children with Cochlear Implant: is the Age of Implantation an Important Factor?

Proper production of vowels has great significance in speech intelligibility. Evidence shows that cochlear implantation has a significant impact on language and reading abilities in some children immediately after the surgery. The aim of the present study is comparing the quality of 6 simple Persian vowels between two groups of cochlear-implanted children under and over 2 years old. This was a cross-sectional analytic study conducted on 70 children who were implanted under the age of 2, 70 children who were implanted over the age of 2 and 238 normal children as control group. For data analysis, the SFS win acoustic analysis was used. Result of this study showed that F2/i/, f1/e/, f2/e/, f2/∞/, f1/a/, F2/a/, f1/o/, F2/o/and F2/u/means had significant difference between three groups (P < 0.05). Children implanted under the age of 2 showed similar performance as normal children in vowel production. Early cochlear implantation (under the age of 2) affects the quality of simple Persian vowel production significantly as well as the increase of speech intelligibility.