Speech perception skills of children with multichannel cochlear implants or hearing aids.

Perceptual skills were evaluated at two intervals of cochlear implant (CI) use in 24 children with prelingual deafness who received the Nucleus multichannel CI. Their performance was compared to that of age-matched children with prelingual profound hearing losses who used conventional hearing aids (HAs). The HA subjects were grouped by unaided thresholds: "gold" subjects (pure tone average of 92 dB hearing level) and "silver" subjects (pure tone average of 104 dB hearing level). The CI users' perceptual abilities increased significantly with time. At the "early" interval (mean, 2 months of CI use), performance of the CI and silver HA groups was similar on measures of phoneme, word, and sentence recognition; the gold HA subjects' performance was superior to that of the other groups. At the "late" interval, (mean, 2.5 years of CI use), CI subjects' performance exceeded that of the silver group on all measures, and was similar to that of the gold group on vowel recognition and auditory-plus-visual sentence recognition measures.