A comparison between patients using cochlear implants and hearing aids. Part I: Results on speech tests

The speech perception ability reported from profoundly hearing-impaired persons using hearing aids or cochlear implants varies widely. A test battery was constructed that consisted of segmental and suprasegmental tasks and connected speech presented in three digerent modalities: visual (V), auditive (A) and audiovisual (AV). Two groups of patients participated. Fifeen subjects with a profound hearing loss (PTA 89.4 dB) used hearing aids (HA) and jifeen subjects used cochlear implants (CI), either a single-channel extracochlear implant, or a multichannel intracochlear implant. The results obtained from the speech reception data showed a great variation among the subjects. In the Connected Discourse Tracking test (CDT),without support of lipreading, the HA-group received a higher mean benefit from their conventional hearing aid compared to the mean for the CI-group. Many of the cochlear implantees obtained great benefit from their aids, but others derived little benefit.