Benefits of Bimodal Stimulation in Children with Cochlear Implant: Role of Nonlinear Frequency Compression Strategy in Acoustic Hearing

Abstract

The present study aimed to determine whether the application of nonlinear frequency compression (NFC) strategy in hearing aid (HA) would provide additional perceptual benefits compared to conventional strategy when used in conjunction with cochlear implant (CI) in children. A total of 16 children in the age range between 8.6 and 11.11 years with cochlear implant using bimodal stimulation participated as subjects. Word recognition performance was assessed in quiet and noisy environments under one monaural cochlear implant alone (CI alone) and two bimodal (CI+HA) listening conditions, i.e. CI+HA with NFC strategy and CI+HA with conventional strategy. The results revealed that children obtained significantly higher (p0.05) in terms of this bimodal benefit between two bimodal listening conditions. Hence, it can be concluded that the application of NFC strategy in acoustic hearing provided perceptual benefits when used in conjunction with cochlear implant. However, there were no additional perceptual benefits which can be credited particularly to the use of NFC over conventional strategy. This supports the position that low-frequency acoustic information contributes to the bimodal benefit.