Psychoacoustic abilities in pediatric cochlear implant recipients: The relation with short-term memory and working memory capacity

Abstract

Objective: The aim was to investigate school-age children with cochlear implants (CIs) and their typically developing peers in terms of auditory short-term memory (ASTM), auditory working memory (AWM), visuospatial short-term memory (VSTM), visuospatial working memory (VWM), spectral resolution and monosyllabic word recognition in noise.Methods: Twenty-three prelingually deaf CI users and twenty-three typically developing (TD) peers aged 7-10 years participated. Twelve children with CI were earlier-implanted (i.e., age at implantation <= 24 months). Children with CIs were compared to typically developing peers and correlations between cognitive and psychoacoustic abilities were computed separately for the groups. Besides, regression analyses were conducted to develop models that could predict SMRT (spectral-temporally modulated ripple test) and speech recognition scores.Results: The AWM scores of the later-implanted group were significantly lower than both earlier-implanted and TD groups. ASTM scores of TD children were significantly higher than both earlier-implanted and laterimplanted participants. There was no statistically significant difference between groups in terms of VSTM and VWM. AWM performance was positively correlated with ASTM, SMRT scores, and speech recognition under noisy conditions for pediatric CI recipients. The AWM was a statistically significant predictor of the SMRT score and the SMRT score was an indicator of speech recognition score under 0 dB SNR condition.Conclusion: Most of children using CI are at risk for clinically remarkable deficits across cognitive abilities such as AWM and ASTM. While evaluating cognitive and psychoacoustic abilities in the clinic routine, it should be kept in mind that they can be influenced by each other.