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Objective-To assess overall speech intelligibility in adolescent cochlear implanted speakers during quiet and multi-speaker babble conditions. Study design-A cross sectional assessment of intelligibility incorporating group (auditory-oral versus total communication speakers), sentence context (high versus low contexts) and background conditions (quiet versus multi-speaker babble).Setting-A camp designed to assess adolescents over a concentrated period of time. Participants: 57 adolescents who participated in an earlier study when they were 8 -9 years old examining functional outcomes of speech perception, speech production and language were asked to participate in follow-up study.Methods-Speech intelligibility was assessed by asking the adolescents to repeat sentences. Sentences were digitally edited and played to normal hearing listeners who either provided broad transcriptions of sound accuracy or wrote down the words they understood when the sentences were presented in quiet and in multi-speaker babble.Main Outcome Variable-The dependent variables were percent correct consonants, vowels and total words identified.Results-Very few substitutions or omissions occurred,--resulting in high levels of accuracy for consonants and vowels. Speech intelligibility in quiet was significantly greater than in the multispeaker babble condition. Multi-speaker babble decreased performance uniformly across sentence context for the two groups.Conclusion-Accurate consonant production based on measures of substitutions and omissions fails to account for distortions and allophonic variations. Reductions in speech intelligibility relative to the phoneme correct productions suggest the allophonic variations related to distortions may influence naïve listener's ability to understand the speech of profoundly deaf individuals.

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