Bilateral versus unilateral cochlear implants in children: A study of spoken language outcomes

Abstract

OBJECTIVES: Although it has been established that bilateral cochlear implants (CIs) offer additional speech perception and localization benefits to many children with severe to profound hearing loss, whether these improved perceptual abilities facilitate significantly better language development has not yet been clearly established. The aims of this study were to compare language abilities of children having unilateral and bilateral CIs to quantify the rate of any improvement in language attributable to bilateral CIs and to document other predictors of language development in children with CIs. DESIGN: The receptive vocabulary and language development of 91 children was assessed when they we..