Long-Term Effects of Cochlear Implant on the Pragmatic Skills and Speech Intelligibility in Persian-Speaking Children

Pragmatic skills of language are important for everyday life interactions. It has been proven that cochlear implantation age should be considered, as an important predictor of language skills in children with cochlear implantation (CI), but information about the benefits of early cochlear implantation on pragmatic language development in these children are very few. Thus, this study intends to compare pragmatic skills as well as speech intelligibility in prelingual deaf children who received cochlear implants before the age of 6 years and those who received cochlear implants after the age of 6 years with an 8-year follow-up.

This Retrospective 8-year longitudinal study was conducted in a cochlear implant center in the city of Tehran, Iran, in 2021. Forty-five children were included in two groups: early cochlear implant (n = 17), and early cochlear implant (n = 28). The Persian version of the children's communication checklist (CCC) was used to assess the participants 'pragmatic skills and the Persian version of the Intelligibility Context Scale (ICS) was used to assess the participants' speech intelligibility.

The two study groups did not show a significant difference in terms of pragmatic scores (P>0.05) but had a significant difference in terms of ISC scores (p <0.001). Speech intelligibility had a significant negative relationship with the age of cochlear implantation (r = -0.5, p <0.001) but had no significant correlation with pragmatic skills (P>0.05).

The long-term results of early and late cochlear implants were similar in terms of the development of pragmatic skills but very different in terms of speech intelligibility. The age of cochlear implantation had no effect on the pragmatic of language.