Development of audiovisual comprehension skills in prelingually deaf children with cochlear implants.

Objective: The present study investigated the development of audiovisual comprehension skills in prelingually deaf children who received cochlear implants.

Methods: We analyzed results obtained with the Common Phrases (Robbins et al., 1995) test of sentence comprehension from 80 prelingually deaf children with cochlear implants who were enrolled in a longitudinal study, from pre-implantation to 5 years after implantation.

Results: The results revealed that prelingually deaf children with cochlear implants performed better under audiovisual (AV) presentation compared with auditory-alone (A-alone) or visual-alone (V-alone) conditions. AV sentence comprehension skills were found to be strongly correlated with several clinical outcome measures of speech perception, speech intelligibility, and language. Finally, pre-implantation V-alone performance on the Common Phrases test was strongly correlated with 3-year postimplantation performance on clinical outcome measures of speech perception, speech intelligibility, and language skills.

Conclusions: The results suggest that lipreading skills and AV speech perception reflect a common source of variance associated with the development of phonological processing skills that is shared among a wide range of speech and language outcome measures.