Objective: To determine whether early-implanted, long-term cochlear implant (CI) users display delays in verbal short-term and working memory capacity when processes related to audibility and speech production are eliminated. Design: Twenty-three long-term CI users and 23 normal-hearing controls each completed forward and backward digit span tasks under testing conditions that differed in presentation modality (auditory or visual) and response output (spoken recall or manual pointing). Results: Normal-hearing controls reproduced more lists of digits than the CI users, even when the test items were presented visually and the responses were made manually via touchscreen response. Conclusions: Short-term and working memory delays observed in CI users are not due to greater demands from peripheral sensory processes such as audibility or from overt speech-motor planning and response output organization. Instead, CI users are less efficient at encoding and maintaining phonological representations in verbal short-term memory using phonological and linguistic strategies during memory tasks.

Purpose: This study investigated long-term speech intelligibility outcomes in 63 prelingually deaf children, adolescents, and young adults who received cochlear implants (CIs) before age 7 (M= 2;11 [years;months], range = 0;8–6;3) and used their implants for at least 7 years (M= 12;1, range = 7;0–22;5).Method: Speech intelligibility was assessed using playback methods with naïve, normal-hearing listeners.Results: Mean intelligibility scores were lower than scores obtained from an age- and nonverbal IQ–matched, normal-hearing control sample, although the majority of CI users scored within the range of the control sample. Our sample allowed us to investigate the contribution of several demographic and cognitive factors to speech intelligibility. CI users who used their implant for longer periods of time exhibited poorer speech intelligibility scores. Crucially, results from a hierarchical regression model suggested that this difference was due to more conservative candidacy criteria in CI users with more years of use. No other demographic variables accounted for significant variance in speech intelligibility scores beyond age of implantation and amount of spoken language experience (assessed by communication mode and family income measures).Conclusion: Many factors that have been found to contribute to individual differences in language outcomes in normal-hearing children also contribute to long-term CI users' ability to produce intelligible speech.

Purpose The current study adopts a systematic approach to the examination of working memory components in pediatric cochlear implant (CI) users by separately assessing contributions of encoding, st...

A key question in cognitive psychology is whether information in short-term memory is lost as a function of time. Lewandowsky, Duncan, and Brown (2004) arg