Written language skills in children with auditory brainstem implants

Auditory performance and language skills in children with auditory brainstem implants and cochlear implants

“…Thus, children with limited auditory access, who do not receive sufficient auditory input in routine listening environments, may develop limited verbal language. Also, there are several studies evaluating hearing performance and language skills in ABI users [1,7,14,27]. The present findings are consistent with these studies.…”

“…The present study assumes a unique contribution to the literature in terms of investigating auditory performance in quiet, noisy, ideal, multi-stimulus environments and environments requiring auditory attention-memory [1,7,10,14]. Similar to other studies assessing hearing quality of life and daily life hearing performance, this study also showed that children with the ABI were poorer [1,14,27]. Possible reasons for this finding may be the lack of auditory stimuli in the preoperative period in children with ABI, different tonotopic organization of the ABI placement site, inability to reach optimum hearing thresholds due to postoperative fitting and follow-up difficulties, and differences in the experience of specialists [2,17,21,30,31].…”

“…In the present study, children who had limited exposure to auditory stimuli during the critical period of 0-2 years of life [29], despite being implanted at a relatively early age, may have performed poorly on the TOLD-P:4 school-age language test for this reason. On the other hand, the lower language scores of children using ABI may be due to the preoperative and postoperative follow-up and rehabilitation difficulties of the ABI process, less audibility in the preoperative period, and the failure of postoperative fitting sessions to achieve good hearing thresholds [18,21,27,31].…”

“…A systematic review of the change of speech perception with cochlear implantation showed that children experienced a sharp improvement in early speech perception in 1 year after implantation. Children who are younger than 18 months benefit from CI in terms of speech recognition faster [3,10,14,27]. On the other hand, ABI develops spoken language in children, but this happens slowly and gradually.…”

“…A study revealed that ABIs are suitable for children with cochlear anomalies to provide auditory input and benefit all developmental areas [2]. It has been found that children using ABI perform poorly compared to their peers using CI in terms of cognitive and language skills and daily life hearing performance [27]. To the authors' best knowledge, there are no studies investigating language skills with the "Children's Auditory Performance Scale (CHAPS)" in children with ABI in the same study.…”