Multichannel cochlear implant. Preliminary results in man.

Cochlear implantations of multichannel electrode arrays have been recently undertaken at the University of California, San Francisco in several totally deaf investigational subjects. One patient was extensively tested with a psychoacoustical battery and is the subject of this communication. Speech testing with CID sentences and open sets of spondee words revealed that this totally deaf subject could achieve approximately 40 to 50% discrimination level with his implant device alone in the absence of visual cues. This represents the first time that speech discrimination has been definitely shown in a cochlear implant subject, and this result has important implications for the future of cochlear implantations.