It has traditionally been assumed that cochlear implant users de facto perform atypically in audiovisual tasks. However, a recent study that combined an auditory task with visual distractors suggests that only those cochlear implant users that are not proficient at recognizing speech sounds might show abnormal audiovisual interactions. The present study aims at reinforcing this notion by invest...

The aim of the study was to investigate low-level visual function in cochlear implant users. Spatial frequency discrimination was assessed in 16 adults with normal hearing and 18 adults with profound deafness who had a cochlear implant. Thresholds were measured with sinusoidal gratings using a two-alternative temporal forced-choice procedure combined with an adaptive staircase. Cochlear implant...

OBJECTIVE While the cochlear implant provides many deaf patients with good speech understanding in quiet, music perception and appreciation with the cochlear implant remains a major challenge for most cochlear implant users. The present study investigated whether a closed-set melodic contour identification (MCI) task could be used to quantify cochlear implant users' ability to recognize musical...

objectives: this study examined the relationship between working and short-term memory performance, and their effects on cochlear implant outcomes (speech perception and speech production) in cochlear implanted children aged 7-13 years. the study also compared the memory performance of cochlear implanted children with their normal hearing peers. methods: thirty-one cochlear implanted children w...

BACKGROUND Past studies using event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited to single syllable stimuli in unilateral and bilateral cochlear implant users have suggested reorganization of the auditory cortex within the first 6-8 mo postimplantation (Sharma et al, 2002a, 2002b, 2006; Bauer et al, 2006). Better behavioral performance with bilateral implants is expected when bilateral cochlear implantat...

OBJECTIVE This review describes the current concept of pneumococcal meningitis in cochlear implant recipients based on recent laboratory studies. It examines possible routes of Streptococcus pneumoniae infection to the meninges in cochlear implant recipients. It also provides insights into fundamental questions concerning the pathophysiology of pneumococcal meningitis in implant recipients. D...

Auditory evoked potentials are tools widely used to assess auditory cortex functions in clinical context. However, in cochlear implant users, electrophysiological measures are challenging due to implant-created artefacts in the EEG. Here, we used independent component analysis to reduce cochlear implant-related artefacts in event-related EEGs of cochlear implant users (n = 12), which allowed de...

Cochlear implantation is an accepted treatment method for adults and children with severe to profound hearing loss. Confidence in technology has led to changes in individuals who can receive a cochlear implant and changes in expected benefit with a cochlear implant. This article describes the research and development activities at MED-EL, which make possible the implementation of new speech-cod...

Cochlear-implant users perform far below normal-hearing subjects in background noise. Speech recognition with varying numbers of competing female, male, and child talkers was evaluated in normal-hearing subjects, cochlear-implant users, and normal-hearing subjects utilizing an eight-channel sine-carrier cochlear-implant simulation. Target sentences were spoken by a male. Normal-hearing subjects...