Environmental Sound Perception of Cochlear Implant Users

The purpose of this study was to develop a new test of environmental sound perception, The Environmental Sounds Perception Test (EST), and to both compare the performance of experienced cochlear implant (CI) recipients to age-equivalent normally hearing (NH) listeners using this new test, as well as pilot test its clinical use as a pre-to-post assessment tool. The closed-set EST consisted of 45 different sounds classified into 9 categories, with each sound being represented by two different tokens. The results showed that the NH participants scored significantly higher than the experienced CI users (p < 0.001). For the Pre-to-post CI group, higher scores were obtained post-surgery with the CI; this difference was approaching significance (p = 0.068). Overall these results suggest that CI recipients are poorer than NH participants, but better than hearing aid users with similar level of hearing loss, on the EST