Speech Recognition, Working Memory and Conversation in Children with Cochlear Implants

This study examined the relationship between speech recognition, working memory and conversational skills in a group of 13 children/adolescents with cochlear implants (CIs) between 11 and 19 years of age. Conversational skills were assessed in a referential communication task where the participants interacted with a hearing peer of the same age and gender. The measures were the number of requests for clarification produced, time used to solve the task and the proportion of the different types of requests for clarification made by the participants with CIs. The results revealed that speech recognition correlated significantly with the general measures of conversational skills (time to solve the task and the total number of requests for clarification used). General working memory was associated with certain types of requests for clarification. The participants with better working memory capacity used more requests for confirmation of new information (i.e. made more suggestions of their own) and fewer requests for confirmation of already given information compared to the participants with poorer working memory. It thus seems as if both speech recognition and working memory contribute to conversational skills but in different ways. Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.