Preferences and Listening Efficiency of Adults With Cochlear Implants During Online Communication.
Francisca Perea Pérez, Douglas E H Hartley, Pádraig T Kitterick and 1 others
PMID 40905781WHAT IT FOUND
Adults with cochlear implants strongly prefer captions during video calls.
Captions improve listening efficiency by about 14% over video alone. However, even with captions, they remain less efficient than normal-hearing peers and report missing facial cues due to attention shifts.
Key findings
01Most participants with cochlear implants preferred the captions mode for all three tested conversations, with 92% choosing it for the lowest quality call.
02Listening efficiency for people with cochlear implants improved by approximately 17% when visual cues were added to audio, and by a further 14% when captions were added to audio-visual streams.
03Even with access to video and accurate captions, the group-average listening efficiency for people with cochlear implants remained about 20% lower than that of acoustic hearing peers.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
Participants were recruited via email and social media, which may have selected for people already comfortable with online technology. The cochlear implant group had a higher proportion of retirees compared to the acoustic hearing group, which may have influenced familiarity with video calling tools. The study used prerecorded stimuli rather than live interactive calls, which limits ecological validity regarding real-time communication dynamics. The captions used in the speech task were perfectly accurate, whereas live captions often contain errors that could affect usability.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest. The study was funded by the Royal National Institute for Deaf People.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that adding captions makes online communication equivalent for patients with cochlear implants. Even with captions, their listening efficiency remains lower than that of normal-hearing peers, and they report increased cognitive load from shifting attention away from visual cues.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →