Assessing speech perception in children with cochlear implants using a modified hybrid visual habituation procedure.

OBJECTIVES: The objectives of this research were to determine whether an adapted version of a Hybrid Visual Habituation procedure could be used to assess speech perception of phonetic and prosodic features of speech (vowel height, lexical stress, and intonation) in individual pre-school-age children who use cochlear implants. DESIGN: Nine children ranging in age from 3;4 to 5;5 participated in this study. Children were prelingually deaf and used cochlear implants and had no other known disabilities. Children received two speech feature tests using an adaptation of a Hybrid Visual Habituation procedure. RESULTS: Seven of the nine children demonstrated perception of at least one speech feature using this procedure using results from a Bayesian linear regression analysis. At least one child demonstrated perception of each speech feature using this assessment procedure. CONCLUSIONS: An adapted version of the Hybrid Visual Habituation Procedure with an appropriate statistical analysis provides a way to assess phonetic and prosodicaspects of speech in pre-school-age children who use cochlear implants.