The influence of early versus late cochlear implantation on the language outcomes of Egyptian Arabic speaking children with congenital bilateral severe-profound sensory-neural hearing loss

Introduction: Young children who experience severe-to-profound sensory-neural hearing loss (SNHL) face challenges in developing spoken language since they are unable to detect acoustic-phonetic cues which are essential for speech recognition. Aim: The aim of this study was to examine the influence of age at implantation on children's language development to detect whether early intervention with cochlear implantation in children with severe to profound SNHL results in better linguistic outcomes. Subjects and Methods: 60 children from the cochlear implant unit from the Kasr El Ainy hospital were recruited to participate in this cross sectional study. They suffered from congenital bilateral severe to profound sensori-neural hearing loss since birth. They all had unilateral cochlear implant. Their ages ranged from 2-7 years old, 30 of them received cochlear implant prior to 5 years of age and the other 30 children received cochlear implant after 5 years of age. They all underwent formal language assessments. Results: Comparison between group I & group II in receptive, expressive and total language ages obtained by the Arabic Language Test with & without visual cues showed a significant difference between group I (early) and group II(late).