A Review of Auditory, Speech and Language Development among Cochlear Implanted Children

Children with profound sensory neural hearing loss are at risk for delay in speech and language development. In addition, hearing loss reduces the auditory perception in children, resulting in poor child’s social interaction. Nowadays cochlear implant is firmly established as effective option in speech and language development of deaf children. The main focus of some of the studies was on child's age and its negative correlation with speech and language learning after cochlear implant. However, other studies indicate that, participating in rehabilitation classes after cochlear implantation, parent's level of education and not having additional disabilities are important in developing speech and language after cochlear implant. So, the main aim of this review was to find the most important factors that affect child's auditory perception and speech and language progress after cochlear implant surgery. Subjects and For this purpose, the Med Line, Google Scholar, Scopus, ISI web of knowledge, and Iranmedex were searched by the key words and more than 70 articles were reviewed. However, some of the articles specially the articles that were gathered from ISI web of knowledge and Scopus data base were omitted because of no access to their full text was available. In addition, non-relevant articles were excluded. In this review, researches, with at least a sample size of 30 children, which compared cochlear implanted children based on their age, parent’s educational level, participating in rehabilitation classes and having additional disabilities were selected. Furthermore, the selected articles were either in Farsi or English with case-control or experimental type studies After gathering relative articles, the evaluation of factors affecting the development of audition, language and speech which were include of child’s age, parent’s educational level, participating in rehabilitation classes and having additional disabilities was done. Child’s age of implantation, participating in rehabilitation program and no additional disabilities have direct impact on cochlear implanted children auditory perception and speech and language progress, while parent’s level of education has an indirect effect. ►Please cite this paper as: Soleimani F, Sajedi F, Hashemi SB, Monshizadeh L. A Review of Auditory, Speech and language Development of Cochlear Implanted Children. Jundishapur Sci Med J 2016;14(6):721-731.