Bilateral cochlear implantation versus unilateral cochlear implantation in deaf children: Effects of sentence context and listening conditions on recognition of spoken words in sentences

Abstract

Objectives: Previous studies have investigated the efficacy of bilateral cochlear implants (CIs) in deaf children. The current study focused on the use of sentence-context information in different listening conditions to better explain the benefits of bilateral cochlear implantation. We compared the word recognition abilities of children with bilateral CIs and children with unilateral CIs in relation to sentence context and listening conditions. Additionally, we investigated whether sentence context- and listening condition-dependent word recognition scores can differentiate children with bilateral CIs from children with unilateral CIs. Methods: Twenty children with bilateral CIs and 20 children with unilateral CIs participated in this study. All children were presented with semantically controlled sentences (high vs. low predictability) in quiet and noisy conditions and were asked to repeat the final words of each sentence. Results: Children with bilateral CIs had significantly higher word recognition scores than children with unilateral CIs on words embedded in both high- and low-predictability sentences in noisy conditions. The two groups recognized more words in high-predictability sentences than in low-predictability sentences in noisy conditions. The scores on the high-predictability sentences in noisy conditions significantly differentiated children with bilateral CIs from children with unilateral CIs. Conclusion: Bilateral cochlear implantation is more advantageous than unilateral cochlear implantation at the auditory-linguistic processing level in complex listening conditions. © 2020 Elsevier B.V.