The Role of Music in Families of Children With Hearing Loss and Normal Hearing in Australia, Finland, and the UK.

The primary aim of this current study was to compare the role, importance and value placed on music by families with normally hearing (NH) children, to those who had a child with a hearing loss (HL) who wore either hearing aids and/or cochlear implants. A secondary aim was to see whether this differed between the countries. Parents of children aged 2-6 years living in Australia, Finland, and the United Kingdom were invited to complete the Role of Music in Families Questionnaire (RMFQ).

A qualitative review of parents' perspectives on the value of CAEP recording in influencing their acceptance of hearing devices for their child.

To obtain a parental perspective on how audiological tests, including recording cortical auditory-evoked potentials (CAEP) to speech sounds, influenced their uptake of hearing devices for their infant. A focus group was established by parents of hearing-impaired children. A facilitator explored how audiology tests influenced their understanding and management of hearing loss in their child and their acceptance of hearing aids or cochlear implant referral.

Expert opinion: Assessing cochlear implant candidacy and progress for people with English as an additional language.

Special considerations relating to cochlear implants (CIs) are necessary for deaf people for whom English is an additional language (EAL). The audiological and pre-linguistic skills criteria for CI candidacy are the same for children with EAL as for children from English-speaking families. However, thorough assessment is not straightforward, for example, requiring employment of experienced interpreters.

Conversion of scores between Bamford, Kowal and Bench (BKB) sentences and Arthur Boothroyd (AB) words in quiet for cochlear implant patients.

This paper describes the relationship between the scores obtained in the Bamford, Kowal and Bench (BKB) sentence test and the Arthur Boothroyd (AB) word test in quiet for a group of 71 cochlear implant users. Each subject was tested at the same appointment and in the same environment during routine clinical appointments at the South of England Cochlear Implant Centre.Using rationalised arcsine transformation and a linear regression calculation, conversion tables were produced from BKB to AB and from AB to BKB scores.

Bilateral sequential cochlear implantation in the congenitally deaf child: evidence to support the concept of a 'critical age' after which the second ear is less likely to provide an adequate level of speech perception on its own.

This study attempts to answer the question of whether there is a 'critical age' after which a second contralateral cochlear implant is less likely to provide enough speech perception to be of practical use. The study was not designed to predict factors that determine successful binaural implant use, but to see if there was evidence to help determine the latest age at which the second ear can usefully be implanted, should the first side fail and become unusable.Outcome data, in the form of speech perception test results, were collected from 11 cochlear implant programmes in the UK and one centre in Australia.