[Speech perception in children fitted with Nucleus mini system 22 implants].

Currently there are over 380 european children implanted with the Nucleus device. A battery of speech perception tests has been adapted and translated into German, French and English by Cochlear AG to evaluate the benefits of the cochlear implant for european children. The tests evaluate a hierarchy of auditory skills classified into four levels including: detection of speech sounds, speech pattern identification; speech identification and speech recognition. A child's auditory-visual skills are also assessed. Over 100 children randomly selected from participating clinics have been assessed postoperatively with these measures and the results analyzed. These children are representative of the diversity amongst the european child population in terms of etiology of deafness, onset of deafness, duration of deafness and experience with the implant. All children were able to score significantly above chance for the first two perceptual tests. Test results for this group of children suggest that children with a later onset and shorter duration of deafness tend to perform better on some auditory tasks than children deafened earlier in life and for a longer period of time. Furthermore it appears that the children's performance on these tests improves with increasing implant experience.