[Speech discrimination in noise for patients with cochlear implants].

The aim of the study was to evaluate the speech discrimination ability of postlingually deaf adults implanted with the Combi 40 cochlear implant in noise and to compare the results with the speech discrimination ability of patients provided with hearing aids. The 12-month postoperative hearing performance of 12 consecutive patients was tested using a sentence discrimination test in quiet and noise. The results of the present study demonstrate that all patients obtained substantial benefit from their implants even in situations coupled with noise. The speech understanding of cochlea-implanted patients appears to be better than that of patients provided with hearing aids. Very high scores (mean, 40.2%) were achieved at a signal-noise ratio of 15 dB.