The long-term objective of this research is to gain a better understanding of the ability of deaf children to use specific types of sensory aids to acquire communication skills. The acquisition of these skills typically occurs slowly and imperfectly in deaf children. When children are totally deaf and cannot benefit from conventional hearing aids, access to the acoustic speech signal must be provided via a sensory aid that does not require cochlear function. Currently, two types of sensory aids are being used with these children: cochlear implants (CI) and vibrotactile aids (VT). The proposed research is designed to quantitate performance and to address fundamental issues related to device candidacy and efficacy. It is hypothesized that: (1) Multichannel CI and multichannel VT are superior to devices with a restricted number of channels in improving the speech perception abilities of totally deaf children who receive no benefit from conventional amplification. (2) The rate of acquisition of speech perception skills is faster with multichannel CI and VT than with a restricted number of channels. A battery of speech perception and language measures will be administered at 6 month intervals to validate these hypotheses. (3) Deaf children who have residual hearing demonstrate superior speech perception abilities with conventional hearing aids than totally deaf children who use a CI or VT. To test this hypothesis, hearing aid subjects will be tested longitudinally on the same measures used to assess the speech perception abilities of the children with CI or VT. (4) Deaf children who have residual hearing demonstrate superior speech perception skills when they have access to multimodal sensory information (auditory, tactual and visual) than when information is perceived via any of the modalities alone. The test measures used will be the same as above but the test conditions will be different. (5) Acoustic stimulation enhances visual attention and perception which promotes the development of cognitive and linguistic learning in deaf children who use CI and VT.
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