Physiological and acoustic measures of speech and voice outcomes in children with cochlear implants

This descriptive study investigated speech and voice outcomes in five children with cochlear implants. Measurements were taken from each speech subsystem: respiratory; laryngeal; velopharyngeal; oral articulatory; and from the timing and coordination between subsystems. Speech intelligibility was measured as a global index of how well the subsystems combined to allow these children to be understood by unfamiliar listeners. Case studies were presented that give a thorough description of each child's developing speech mechanism. Results indicated that although the children performed outside normative ranges on many of the measurements of the speech subsystems, overall their speech was at least 80% intelligible to unfamiliar listeners. Results also suggested that these children are in the midst of refining their speech-motor systems in response to auditory information provided by cochlear implants.