Background: Cochlear implantation is a common surgical procedure for children with profound hearing loss who receive minimal or no benefit from traditional hearing aids. Auditory categorization is an important process in the perception and understanding of everyday sounds. This process involves both high level cognitive processes and low-level perceptual encoding of the acoustic signal.
Aim of the work: To understand the ability of a cohort of Egyptian children with Cochlear Implant to perceive everyday sounds compared to normal hearing children.
Patient and Methods: Ninety subjects divided into 2 groups were included in the present study. Group I: Fifty normal hearing children (NH). Group II: Forty CI users. A set of 18 natural stimuli were studied. They were chosen to cover a broad range of everyday sounds that corresponded to four mains a priori categories: nonlinguistic human vocalizations, animal vocalizations, environmental sounds& musical instruments. Children were asked to name/identify the sounds in an open-set identification task.
Results: Results showed that cochlear implant users were different from normal hearing listeners regarding the perception of individual sounds. Normal hearing children could identify sounds better than the CI children. In normal hearing children, the best identification was for human vocalizations, while in cochlear implant children the best identification was for animal vocalizations. Both groups had lower identification scores for both environmental and musical sounds. Sound identification scores increased with increasing chronological age of both groups.
Conclusion: Cochlear implant children have reduced relative ability toward identification of superordinate category of non-linguistic human vocalizations compared to age and gender matched normal hearing children.