Comparison between two perception tests in patients with severe and profoundly severe prelingual sensori-neural deafness.

Patients with severe and profoundly severe bilateral sensorineural prelingual deafness constitute a group of particular interest in the organization of the National Health Service; every patient must, in fact, follow a prosthetic-rehabilitative-educational programme lasting many years and organized under different areas to compensate for his/her communicative difficulties, especially with regard to the speech canal. No reliable data providing details of the efficacy and efficiency of any of these points is available. A critical point in the rehabilitation process is that of auditory perception training. Of the few auditory perception tests presently available in Italian, the following were examined: namely, EARS (Evaluation of Auditory Responses to Speech) battery, on the one hand, and the Italian version of the ESP (Early Speech Perception), GASP (Glendonald Auditory Screening Procedure). NU-CHIPS (Northwestern University Children's Perception of Speech) and WIPI (Word Intelligibility by Picture Identification) tests on the other. A group of 10 patients presenting severe and profoundly severe bilateral sensori-neural prelingual deafness received the two tests at the beginning and after six months of auditory perception rehabilitation. The findings emerging from the two different test sessions were analysed and compared. The EARS battery was seen to have enabled even very early and highly developed stages of auditory perception to be detected in comparison with the other battery, which, however, was more accurate in evaluating the ability to discriminate and identify words on the basis of their spectral characteristics. The Authors propose the combined use of the two test batteries to evaluate the efficacy and efficiency of auditory perception training in patients with severe and profoundly severe bilateral sensori-neural prelingual deafness.