Reading skills after cochlear implantation

Abstract

It has frequently been found that profoundly deaf children with conventional hearing aids have difficulties with the comprehension of written text. Cochlear Implants (CIs) were expected to enhance the reading comprehension of these profoundly deaf children because they provide auditory access to spoken language. This research showed that profoundly deaf children with CIs had better reading skills than deaf children without CIs. Furthermore, we verified a link between auditory speech perception and reading comprehension in a hypothesized causal chain. The relatively high level of reading comprehension in the deaf children with CIs could for a large part be attributed to the post-implant development of receptive vocabulary that in turn, was associated with their improved post-implant auditory speech perception abilities. These findings indicate that the use of a cochlear implant provided greater access to spoken language and enabled the children to achieve relatively high reading comprehension levels.