[Research of the effect of cochlear implant and hearing aid on voice quality of hearing impaired children].

OBJECTIVE

To discuss the effect of cochlear implant and hearing aid to voice quality.

METHOD

Four groups of randomly selected 73 subjects were compared. The groups comprised: cochlear implant children, children using hearing aids, normal hearing children and deaf children with no hearing instrumentation. The latter two groups were control groups. Each subject was required to phonate /ae/ about 3 s using 'voice assessment' to record the sound, and following voice acoustic variables were analysed: F0, SDF0, Jitter, Shimmer, NNE, HNR, SNR.

RESULT

Voice F0 of children with cochlear implant was significantly lower that the other three groups (P<0.05); there were no significant difference between hearing aid group, normal hearing group, and deaf children group with no intervention (P>0. 05); SDF0 of cochlear implant group and hearing aids group were significantly larger than the normal hearing group and deaf children group with no intervention (P<0.05), and the interaction of two factors (hearing and sex) was close to the critical level of significance (P>0.05), which means that cochlear implant and hearing aid could have affected the SDF0 of female children more than those of male children. There were no significant difference among all the four groups about voice quality variables: Jitter, Shimmer, NNE, HNR, SNR.

CONCLUSION

Cochlear implant and hearing aid mainly change the voice F0 and/or SDF0, and have no effect on the voice quality variables.