[Management of cochlear implants in children--methods and results]. / Cochlearimplantatversorgung bei Kindern--Methoden und Ergebnisse.

Selection criteria, basic principles of auditory training, development of an auditory test battery for children and results of 15 children between 4 and 14 years are presented and discussed. To summarize, results range from acoustic attention to tones and sounds and recognition of environmental sounds to the use of supra-segmental and segmental features of speech. Some children are able to recognize words and phrases from a closed list. One of the children has postlingual deafness and has had also a very short duration of deafness before implantation. This child shows better results than the pre and perilingually deaf children. Because of the fact that the patient group is small and there are also many intervening variables like age, duration of deafness and use of two different test instruments, it is difficult to find a relationship between the results and all other variables. The auditory test battery for children, which consists of seven subtests, measuring acoustic orientation and auditory speech perception on different linguistic levels, is much more suitable for the evaluation of auditory performance for this age group than the auditory test battery for adults (Eisenwort and Burian 1988).

First behind the ear-wearable speech processor for the Vienna cochlear prosthesis. A preliminary report.

A behind the ear-wearable speech processor for the Vienna cochlear prosthesis has been designed. In a comparative study 6 patients used the new device for 1 week and were then tested. The results from the auditory test battery and a speech tracking were about the same, only the perception of speech from an open list was better when the patients used the conventional processor. It is possible to reduce the size of a speech processor substantially by modifying the speech-processing strategy without major decrease of the performance. More patients have to be tested after using the device for a longer time.

[Effect of the amount of food as a visible external stimulus on the eating behavior of obese children]. / Einfluss von Nahrungsmenge als sichtbarer Aussenreiz auf das Essverhalten adipöser Kinder.

In our study we investigated the influence of different amounts of food, offered to obese children. We compared the food intake of 15 obese children (8 girls, 7 boys mean overweight: 41 +/- 7%) aged 10 to 12 years (mean age: 11,3 +/- 0,8) with matched normal weight children: Obese children consumed significantly more food than the control group, independently of the amount of food offered. Offering higher amounts of food, obese children tended to eat more and increased their food intake significantly. Therefore we suggest, that obese children are more dependent on external stimulus concerning the amounts of offered food than normal weight children.