Bilaterally Combined Electric and Acoustic Hearing in Mandarin-Speaking Listeners: The Population With Poor Residual Hearing.
Duo-Duo Tao, Ji-Sheng Liu, Zhen-Dong Yang and 2 others
PMID 29451107WHAT IT FOUND
For Mandarin speakers with severe-to-profound hearing in the aided ear, adding a hearing aid to a cochlear implant improved only tone recognition when tones were equal in length and sentence recognition in noise.
Average gains were 4 and 6 percentage points.
Key findings
01Using both devices was significantly better than using the implant alone for tone recognition when tones were equal in length and for sentence recognition in noise.
02The implant alone was significantly better than the hearing aid alone for disyllabic word recognition and sentence recognition in quiet and in noise, but not for tone recognition.
03More residual hearing at 125 Hz was associated with greater hearing-aid benefit for equal-length tone recognition, and more residual hearing at 250 Hz was associated with greater benefit for sentences in noise.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
Only 17 participants were tested, and they included both children and adults, so individual benefit varied widely. All participants had severe-to-profound hearing loss before age 2, so the findings may not apply to cochlear implant users with better residual hearing. Hearing aid target gain was not verified during testing, and aided thresholds varied, so some speech components may not have been audible. The average gains for the significant bimodal tasks were 4 and 6 percentage points, which may not be clinically meaningful. Some participants did worse when the hearing aid was added, including one participant for sentences in quiet. The study used prelingually deafened children and adults, but the literature it discusses is mostly postlingually deafened adults, so comparisons are limited.
Declared interests
Research support is listed as N.I.H. extramural and non-U.S. government. The supplied text does not state author conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that every Mandarin-speaking cochlear implant user with poor residual hearing should wear a hearing aid in the other ear. The average gains were 4 and 6 percentage points on two tests, many comparisons were not significant, and one subject did worse with the hearing aid added.