Role of clinician's speech characteristics in auditory training of post-lingual cochlear implant in adult patients

Abstract

Auditory training of cochlear implant patients is an integral part of the program aiming at the utmost benefit from the device. Speech perception with the implant has to be gradually taught through several sessions. The program improvised herein is composed of four levels of exercises: discrimination, identification, recognition and comprehension. At the end of the last level, the patient should perceive and comprehend correctly connected speech without the use of visual cues. In Ain Shams University Hospitals, 10 clinicians in the phoniatric unit shared in the rehabilitation program. Each had different speech characteristics that were found to have an impact on the speech perception of the patients. Ten post-lingual cochlear implant adult patients were included in this research aiming at finding a correlation between the speech characteristics of each clinician and the degree of speech perception by the patients. The results have shown that the durational cues are important in speech perception especially vowel duration. © 2003, Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.