Role of clinician's speech characteristics in auditory training of post-lingual cochlear implant patients

ABSTRACT

Auditory training of cochlear implant patients is an integral part of the program aiming at the utmost benefit from the device. Speech perception with the implant has to be gradually taught through several sessions. The program improvised in this is composed of four levels. At the end of the last level, the patient should perceive and comprehend correctly connected speech without the use of visual cues. In Ain Shams University Hospitals, ten clinicians in the phoniatric unit share in the rehabilitation program. Each has different speech characteristies that were found to have an impact on the speech perception of the patients. Ten post-lingual cochlear implant patients were included in this research aiming at finding a correlation between the speech characteristics of each clinician and the degree of speech perception by the patients. The results have shown that the timing factor is very important in speech perception especially vowel duration