Environmental Sound Perception of Cochlear Implant Users

The purposes of this study were (1) to develop a new test of environmental sound perception, the Environmental Sounds Perception Test (EST), (2) to compare the performance of experienced cochlear implant (CI) recipients with that of age-equivalent normally hearing (NH) listeners using this new test, and (3) to 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 2 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 perform poorer than NH participants on the EST but better than hearing-aid users with a similar level of hearing loss.