Age at implantation and development of vocal and auditory preverbal skills in implanted deaf children

Evaluation of auditory development in infants and toddlers who received cochlear implants under the age of 24 months with the LittlEARS® Auditory Questionnaire

“…These results confirm the outcomes of the presented study by emphasizing that hearing impaired children implanted at an early age (mean age: 18.9 months) are likely to catch up to their NH peers in regards to their auditory development. This is consistent with what has been proposed by Tait et al [26] who investigated the vocal and auditory preverbal skills in three homogenous groups of children who had received CIs between 1-2, 2-3, and 3-4 years of age, respectively. Their results showed significantly better performance in children from the youngest group as well.…”

“…This stratification was selected as both age groups represent ''extreme'' groups, i.e. very early [1,4,7,8,25] and late [9,26] implantation and are thus suitable to assess if very early or late implantation influences auditory development. Nonparametric Mann-Whitney U-tests were conducted to investigate if a statistically significant difference between the two groups exists.…”

EARS® (Evaluation of Auditory Responses to Speech): An Internationally Validated Assessment Tool for Children Provided with Cochlear Implants

“…The benefit for younger children can also be seen in figure 1 , which shows the slowest benefit in children implanted at 1 year of age and younger. These results are in contrast to multiple studies stating that speech perception skills improve faster in early-implanted children than in late-implanted children [19][20][21] . However, it must be noted that our study included children whose implantation age ranged from !…”

Auditory, speech and language development in young children with cochlear implants compared with children with normal hearing

“…Tait et al [25] pointed out that long-term results are needed to gain insights into listening and vocal skills at early stages. We believe that more longitudinal studies with larger populations are needed to evaluate the hearing, speech and language development in young children with CIs.…”