1-Year Postactivation Results for Sequentially Implanted Bilateral Cochlear Implant Users

Contrasting benefits from contralateral implants and hearing aids in cochlear implant users

“…Schafer and Thibodeau (2006) presented sentences from 0 and two uncorrelated multi-classroom recordings at 135 and 225 and found a bilateral SRT benefit of 2 dB relative to the first-implanted ear, which allowing for better ear contributions appears in approximate agreement with the adult binaural benefit that is on the order of 1 dB. Several studies have described longitudinal speech outcomes in BiCI children delineated according to age at implantation in one or both ears (Peters et al, 2007;Wolfe et al, 2007;Gordon and Papsin, 2009;Scherf et al, 2009a;Sparreboom et al, 2011). Monaural performance is generally more similar between ears when children are implanted early, and the delay between implantations is small or absent.…”

“…For co-located speech and noise, benefits are marginally larger than in quiet, and are also larger than for adults tested in noise possibly due to better ear contributions. Occasionally larger benefits (Litovsky et al, 2006b;Wolfe et al, 2007) may be attributable to high subject variation or experimental methods that lead to an increased role of loudness summation. For spatially separated speech and noise the monaural benefit due to the head-shadow approaches that found in adults (Litovsky et al, 2006b;Peters et al, 2007;Galvin et al, 2007Galvin et al, , 2008Steffens et al, 2008).…”

Bilateral cochlear implantation in children: Localization and hearing in noise benefits

“…Data from studies in children are often difficult to compare, as different age groups (and therefore widely different test material) are used, but consistent bilateral benefits have been reported where within-subject comparisons of listening with a single or bilateral devices has been performed [8,24,25].…”

Comparison of bilateral and unilateral cochlear implants in children with sequential surgery

“…Only a few studies have demonstrated a significant benefit with bilateral versus unilateral implantation for speech recognition in quiet conditions [10][11][12]. However, these studies are limited by concerns about the number of patients and the observation times.…”