Behavioral Inhibition and Cochlear Implants

Cochlear Implants (CIs) enable many prelingually deaf children to acquire spoken language skills although individual speech and language outcomes are quite varied. Differences in a range of underlying cognitive skills may explain a portion of this variance. The aim of this study was to determine if variation in behavioral inhibition skills of prelingually deaf children were related to speech perception, language, vocabulary knowledge, and speech intelligibility outcome measures after implantation. We conducted a retrospective analysis of longitudinal data collected from prelingually and profoundly deaf children who used CIs. A continuous performance task that did not require any auditory processing was used to measure behavioral inhibition skills. Audiological outcomes based on a battery of speech and language measures were obtained from children after 1, 2, and 3 years of CI use. Compared to published norms, the children in our sample performed in the low-normal range and delay task performance improved as a function of chronological age as well as length of CI use. A correlational analysis revealed several significant associations between behavioral inhibition and receptive and expressive language, vocabulary knowledge, and speech intelligibility scores. Most of these relations remained significant even when the effects of length of CI use and chronological age were partialled out. These findings suggest that speech and language processing skills are closely related to the development of verbal encoding skills, subvocal rehearsal skills, and verbally mediated self-regulatory skills in prelingually deaf children with CIs.