Audiovisual Processing Skills Before Cochlear Implantation Predict Postoperative Speech Recognition in Adults.
Aaron C Moberly, David B Pisoni, Terrin N Tamati
PMID 38143302WHAT IT FOUND
After cochlear implantation, visual benefit did not significantly decrease at six months.
Before surgery, better audiovisual sentence recognition was associated with better auditory-only sentence recognition later.
Key findings
01Visual enhancement did not significantly change from before surgery to six months after cochlear implant activation.
02Pre-operative visual enhancement was positively associated with post-operative auditory-only sentence recognition in quiet and in babble.
03Pre-operative visual enhancement was not associated with post-operative isolated word recognition.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
Thirty participants from one clinical program may not represent all adult cochlear implant candidates. Four participants reported hearing loss onset before age 12, so they may not have been strictly post-lingually deafened. Some participants reached ceiling performance in audiovisual sentence recognition at six months, which could restrict visual enhancement scores. The planned 12-month testing was not completed for more than half of participants because of the pandemic, so the findings cover only six months of device use. The study did not randomize treatment and did not test a rehabilitation program, so it cannot show that audiovisual training causes better outcomes. Raw pre-operative audiovisual scores predicted post-operative auditory-only scores similarly to visual enhancement, so the extra computation did not clearly add predictive value.
Declared interests
No author conflict-of-interest statement appears in the article text. The supplied publication types list NIH extramural and non-U.S. government research support.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as showing that audiovisual training causes better outcomes. The study found no significant change in visual enhancement, did not test training, and twenty participants continued wearing a contralateral hearing aid.