Perception of connected speech without lipreading, using a multi-channel hearing prosthesis.

Four of 13 totally deaf patients implanted with the Nucleus multi-channel hearing prosthesis at the University of Melbourne have demonstrated the ability to understand connected speech without lipreading or other visual cues. These patients were able to repeat verbatim unknown material read by a tester at rates of up to 35 words per minute. They were also able to understand an average of 78% of key words in everyday sentences in ideal acoustic conditions and 51% of equivalent material over the telephone. These results show that with a good proportion of postlingually deaf patients, the multi-channel hearing prosthesis can not only act as an aid to lipreading, but also restore effective speech understanding without lipreading.