Comparison of Speech Intelligibility in Farsi Speaking 5 to 7 Year Olds with Moderate to Severe Hearing Loss, between Children with Cochlear Implants and Children Using Hearing Aids

Speech intelligibility reduction is one of the main feature of people with hearing loss. It is an important subject in clinical studies and researches. Among the important issues in children with hearing loss, is determining their level of speech intelligibility and comparison among different groups of hearing loss. This assessment can be done with various tasks & different listener judgments So in this study, we evaluate and compare speech intelligibility in children with cochlear implant and children using hearing aids with moderate to severe hearing loss.This study was a cross-sectional study in which we used the story telling section of Daruee’s speech intelligibility test (2013), and compared speech intelligibility of 11 CI children with 11 HA children based on the judgement of different listeners (the mother, an experienced person, a less experienced person, and a stranger). For statistical analysis, the following tests were carried out via SPSS v. 20 software: Normality tests, Kolmogorov- Smirnov, and Box's test.Analysis showed that between the two groups, judgments of four listener groups about speech intelligibility of HL children were not significantly different (P-Value>0.05), however, in each group, judgments were significantly different (P-Value<0.05), mothers assigned the highest scores while the stranger assigned the lowest scores.Despite the fact that HL in CI children was sever to profound, in comparison to HA children, their speech clarity didn’t show a significant difference. It shows that children with high levels of HL, with use of appropriate audio equipment have the potential ability to reach high levels of communication skills.