Performance variability on perceptual discrimination tasks in profoundly deaf adults with cochlear implants.

This was not a treatment trial. It measured how people performed on listening tasks, so it cannot show that a cochlear implant or hearing aid caused better discrimination. Many participants could not perform the main tasks, and the authors said group statistical analyses would not be meaningful. The sample was 35 adults, and only 3 performed well on both tasks, so patterns in those groups should be viewed cautiously. One participant did not complete the talker task and another did not complete the accent task. Participants were mostly native English speakers who had lived in Indiana, Illinois or Ohio, so accent discrimination may not apply to other regions or languages. The authors could not evaluate duration of hearing loss before implantation. Participants were grouped by device use, not randomly assigned. The study did not separate the effects of cochlear implant use, hearing aid use, residual hearing, acoustic features, and possible cognitive factors. The tasks may have been too difficult to detect benefit from a cochlear implant plus a hearing aid.

The authors declared no conflicts of interest. The study was funded by NIH/NIDCD and by the Psi Iota XI Philanthropic Organization.

Do not read the good performance of some users of a cochlear implant plus a hearing aid as proof that the hearing aid improves discrimination. The participants already used cochlear implants, hearing aids were not randomly assigned, and some users of a cochlear implant plus a hearing aid performed poorly.