%0 Journal Article
%T Performance of Indian Children with Cochlear Implant on PEACH Scale
%A Suman Kumar
%A Nachiketa Rout
%A Navnit Kumar
%A Indranil Chatterjee
%A H. Selvakumaran
%J ISRN Otolaryngology
%D 2013
%R 10.1155/2013/565096
%X This study compares the functional language performance of Tamil-speaking children ( ) who received a cochlear implant (CI) before 2 years of age (earlier implanted group: EIG) and between 3 and 4 years of age (later implanted group: LIG). Everyday functional language of children was evaluated by interviewing parents using the adapted ParentsĄ¯ Evaluation of Aural/Oral Performance of Children (PEACH) Questionnaire in Tamil language. On average, both groups of children had difficulties in everyday language functioning. However, functional results of EIG were better than those of LIG. In addition significant correlations were found between age at intervention and PEACH score. The evidence lends support to early intervention increasing the functional performance of the children fitted with CI. PEACH can be a clinically feasible evaluation tool to implement in practice for clinicians to obtain meaningful information regarding childrenĄ¯s auditory performance in real life at childhood. 1. Introduction Young children with severe to profound sensorineural hearing loss face challenges in developing spoken language, literacy, psychological functioning, and academic achievement [1¨C4]. Parents, educators, clinicians, and researchers also agreed that language acquisition in young children with severe to profound hearing loss represents a major challenging issue for them [5]. They reported that children with permanent hearing loss are unable to detect acoustic-phonetic cues essential for speech recognition, even when fitted with traditional amplification devices [4]. Studies reported that, in these children, cochlear implant (CI) provides significant gain in auditory perception and speech production [6, 7]. Osberger [8] claimed that the cochlear implant has a dramatic impact on improving the acquisition and use of spoken language by deaf children, with positive ripple effects socially and psychologically. Therefore improvement in speech and language skills has been considered as an essential goal in children having cochlear implantation [9, 10]. Although the auditory information provided by CI is not as rich and complex as normal hearing [11], prelinguistically deaf children who receive a cochlear implant before the age of 10 years gained significantly better speech production skills than children who implanted later [12]. Furthermore, they learned language at a faster rate than normal peers [4, 13]. Studies also reported that children with CI attained language levels near to similar-age peers with normal hearing after up to 5 years of implant use [14, 15]. Most of
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/isrn.otolaryngology/2013/565096/