Set Memory in Congenital Deafness and Bilateral Cochlear Implant

Children are able to repeat normal and abnormal sentences when they have built a formal linguistic system of rules, which works independently of world knowledge. In clinical routine, we assess grammatical skills of cochlear implanted children with the subtest "Set Memory" from the “Language Acquisition Test for three to five year old children” (SETK 3 – 5). The data of 98 children in the test age of 48 to 71 months were evaluated retrospectively. The analysis was carried out in two age groups: gr.1 n = 60 with a mean implantation age of 9 months (min-max: 5 – 12 months) and gr. 2 n = 38 with a mean implantation age of 17 month (min-max: 13 – 24 month). All children were congenitally deaf on both sides and simultaneously bilaterally provided within the first two years of life. The evaluation is carried out in the percentile rank, which allows the comparison to hearing peers. Gr.1 achieves a mean percentile rank of 41 and gr.2 a mean percentile rank of 18. The group of earlier implanted children shows significantly better results, almost comparable to the hearing peers. We conclude that bilaterally congenitally deaf children, simultaneously bilaterally provided with CI within the first year of life, can build up age-appropriate linguistic abilities until enrollment, while there are lower chances for bilaterally congenitally deaf children, provided with CI on both sides in their second year of life.

Publikationsverlauf

Publikationsdatum:
23. April 2019 (online)