gms | German Medical Science

After cochlear implantation in the first two years of life, parents hope that language acquisition similar to same aged hearing peers and taking part in regular school system will be possible. In an ongoing evaluation during clinical routine, we use german language acquisition tests, standardized for hearing children, with regard to the chronological age of the implanted children and compare it to the results of the hearing peers. To date we assessed 21 bilaterally cochlear implanted children and divided them into a group of 12 children implanted in the first year of life (average of age at implantation 6,5 month) and a group of 9 children implanted in the second year of life (average of age at implantation 17,44 month). All children were tested at chronological age of two years with “Sprachentwicklungstest für zweijährige Kinder” (SETK2) and at chronological age of three years with “Sprachentwicklungstest für dreijährige Kinder” (SETK3). The results of the receptive subtests, word comprehension and sentence comprehension of the two groups were compared to each other and to the same aged hearing peers. Statistic was done with T-Test. The group of children implanted in the first year of their life showed significant better results in word and sentence comprehension at age of two years and in the more challenging test of sentence comprehension at age of three years compared to the children implanted in their second year of life. In general they also had results comparable to the hearing peers. The group of children implanted in their second year of life showed receptive language skills below the average of the hearing peers at chronological age of two years. In the following test they showed a significant progress, although the level of sentence comprehension was increased and so they just reached a mean value of percentile within the normative range of hearing peers at chronological age of three years. After cochlear implantation in the first year of life we may expect receptive language skills comparable to hearing peers at time of enrolment in kindergarten. We also may expect a significant progress in language comprehension from SETK2 to SETK3 for children implanted in the second year of their life, but we may not expect their receptive language skills comparable to the earlier implanted as well as to the same aged hearing peers. We intent to do some follow-up testing and increase the number of the evaluation group to describe qualified expectations and indications for differences in receptive language development after cochlear implantation with respect to age at implantation.