A Korean study has compared the word recognition abilities of children with a bilateral cochlear implantation and children with a unilateral cochlear implantation.

Findings in the study

The study found that children with bilateral cochlear implantations had significantly higher word recognition scores than children with unilateral bilateral cochlear implantations with words embedded in both high- and low-predictability sentences in noisy conditions.

Both groups in the study recognised more words in high-predictability sentences than in low-predictability sentences in noisy conditions. But the scores in the high-predictability sentences in noisy conditions significantly differentiated children with bilateral cochlear implantations from children with unilateral cochlear implantations.

About the study

A total of 40 children participated in the study: 20 children with unilateral cochlear implantations and 20 children with bilateral cochlear implantations.

All participants were recruited from Dong-A University Hospital in Korea. Before the implantation, the children had bilateral profound sensorineural hearing loss of 90 dB or greater in their better ears and experienced little or no speech recognition benefits from hearing aids.

The study, “Bilateral cochlear implantation versus unilateral cochlear implantation in deaf children: Effects of sentence context and listening conditions on recognition of spoken words in sentences”, was published in the International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology.

Sources: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ and the International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology.