Open-set speech recognition in children with a single-channel cochlear implant.

We evaluated the ability of profoundly deaf children using the 3M/House single-channel cochlear implant to understand speech without the aid of speechreading. Fifty-one implanted children over the age of 5 years, who had sufficient cognitive and language skills, were tested using word and sentence stimuli presented in an open-set, auditory-only mode. Fifty-two percent of the children demonstrated some open-set performance on word identification, while 41.5% did so on sentence comprehension. Children who scored open-set had a shorter duration of deafness than those who did not. A larger proportion of children using oral communication demonstrated open-set speech recognition than those using total communication. A multiple regression analysis indicated that communication method accounted for the largest proportion of variability in performance on both the word and sentence tasks. Children achieving open-set auditory recognition, however, included both those using oral communication and those using total communication, children deafened by meningitis and those born deaf, and children with varying durations of deafness.