Moreover, the precise reasons for the enormous variability in speech and language outcomes are still unclear and remain poorly understood at this time, even after many years of clinical research on cochlear implants (see Niparko et al., 2009).

However, they do not work equally well for all children and adults who receive this medical intervention. Cochlear implants work well in many hearing impaired listeners. Understanding individual differences in outcomes in this clinical population will also be critical for developing new screening methods that can be used to identify those children who may be at high risk for poor outcomes as early as possible so that novel targeted behaviorally-based interventions can be used to help children achieve optimal levels of performance from their implants and reach important speech and language milestones in development.ДЄt the present time, many outcome studies have been published documenting the success of cochlear implants in both children and adults (see Kirk & Choi, 2009). Why are some deaf children very successful with their cochlear implants, often achieving вЂњnear-normalвЂќ scores within the range of variation observed in typically-developing age-matched normal-hearing peers, while other children struggle and show substantial delays and weaknesses in domains such as speech perception, spoken word recognition, sentence processing, vocabulary, language and reading? Answers to these questions about the underlying factors that are responsible for the variability in speech and language outcomes following implantation have important clinical implications for improving diagnosis and treatment of children with profound hearing loss. One of our long-term objectives is to understand and explain the enormous variability and individual differences in speech and language outcomes in deaf children who have received cochlear implants.

Forward and backward digit span test