Speech and Language Outcomes in Adults and Children with Cochlear Implants

Cochlear implants (CIs) represent a significant engineering and medical milestone in the treatment of hearing loss for both adults and children. In this review, we provide a brief overview of CI technology, describe the benefits that CIs can provide to adults and children who receive them, and discuss the specific limitations and issues faced by CI users. We emphasize the relevance of CIs to the linguistics community by demonstrating how CIs successfully provide access to spoken language. Furthermore, CI research can inform our basic understanding of spoken word recognition in adults and spoken language development in children. Linguistics research can also help us address the major clinical issue of outcome variability and motivate the development of new clinical tools to assess the unique challenges of adults and children with CIs, as well as novel interventions for individuals with poor outcomes.