The Impact of Cochlear Implant in the Oral Language of Children with Congenital Deafness.

Introduction: Children with severe to profound sensorineural deafness can acquire vocabulary and syntactic structures to communicate by oral language, after cochlear implant.

Aim: Identify the linguistic skills of children with cochlear implant.

Material And Methods: Eighteen children of both gender, between 9 and 10 years, with congenital bilateral deafness, using cochlear implant, were studied. The evaluation instrument used was Observation Chart of Language-School Level. The results were compared with standard of normal-hearing children with the same hearing age.

Results: The scores registered in the linguistics structures studied, comparing implanted children and standard, was: phonology, 29.44 ± 8.4 vs. 29.68 ± 5.90, p = 0.91; semantics, 18.55 ± 8.89 vs. 19.20 ± 4.85, p = 0.76; morpho-syntax 21.89 ± 12.85 vs. 26.35 ± 10.36, p = 0.159. Regarding the tests of semantics, there was no significant difference. Concerning the tests of morpho-syntactic structure, the difference was significant in the derivation of words, 2.83 ± 2.81 vs. 4.65 ± 1.64, p = 0.014. In the phonology, a significant difference was found comparing implanted children and standard, in the discrimination of pseudo words, 6.6 ± 2.8 vs. 8.37 ± 2.32, p = 0.023. However, in syllabic segmentation, implanted children had a mean score 8.56 ± 1.6 significantly higher than standard, 5.9 ± 1.58, p < 0.001.

Discussion: The similarity of the scores obtained by children with cochlear implants with the standard, in the language components studied confirms that cochlear implant promotes the development of oral verbal language in children with congenital deafness.

Conclusions: Implanted children had acquired language skills similar to normal-hearing children with the same hearing age.