Does early cochlear implantation promote better reading comprehension skills?

Objective to investigate the effect of age at CI activation and to explore the role of other variables such as linguistic skills, stimulation modality and gender on reading comprehension. Study Design Prospective observational nonrandomized study. Methods 89 children with profound congenital sensorineural hearing loss were included in the study. The mean age at CI activation was 21 months (DS +/- 11; range 7-50). The Italian reading standardized test, “Prove di lettura MT”, was used to assess reading comprehension. The individual raw data MT score were converted into z scores (expected values: means =0 and SD=1). The positive values indicated better performance and negative values indicated worse performance. Results Early implanted children achieved significantly better reading comprehension skills, 54 out of 89 children are within 1 SD from the overall mean. 34 children (38.2%) attainted MT z-scores less than 1 SD below the mean. Children with unilateral CI perform somewhat worse in compared to bilateral CI and bimodal stimulation mode, although the differences were weakly significant from a statistical point of view. A strong and positive correlation (rho 0.69, p <0.001) was found with the lexical and morphosyntactic comprehension (rho 0.70, p <0.001). Not significantly different values were observed for gender and parental education level. Conclusion Early cochlear implantation promoted better development of reading skills in children with cochlear implantation.