Av Integration with Cochlear Implants

Although there has been a great deal of recent empirical work and new theoretical interest in audio-visual perception of speech in both normal-hearing and hearing-impaired adults, relatively little is known about the development of these abilities and skills in deaf children with cochlear implants (CIs). This study examined the way in which children integrate visual speech cues available in the talker’s face with auditory speech cues provided by their CIs to enhance spoken language comprehension. A measure of audiovisual integration ability, R, developed by Sumby and Pollack (1954), was computed using sentence comprehension scores obtained from the Common Phrases Test that was administered using auditory and audiovisual conditions. R represents the amount of gain provided in the AV condition relative to the possible gain in performance in the A condition. Because R is normalized relative to absolute performance in the A condition, R measures the ability of a perceiver to utilize and integrate combined auditory and visual information. The results of our analyses indicated that children who were better at recognizing isolated words through listening alone were also better at combining and integrating the complementary information about articulation that is available under multimodal presentation. In addition, we found that children who were better integrators also displayed higher speech intelligibility scores. Treatment programs that aim to increase receptive or productive ability in children who have CIs, therefore, may wish to focus and emphasize the inherent cross-correlations between auditory and visual information in speech.