“…Support for this assumption can be found in studies of children with CIs, which tend to find that speech perception improves more with earlier implantation (Blamey, Sarant, Paatsch, Barry, Bow, Wales, Wright, Psarros, Rattigan, and Tooher, 2001b;Wu and Yang, 2003;Mildner, Šindija, and Zerinski, 2006). In a study of Mandarin-speaking hearing-impaired children, Wu and Yang (2003) concluded that speech perception improved over a 2-year follow-up period, with improvements negatively correlated with the age at implantation and positively correlated with the duration of implant use.…”