Working Memory in Deaf Children with Cochlear Implants: Correlations between Digit Span and Measures of Spoken Language Processing

One of the most important problems in the field of pediatric cochlear implants is understanding the enormous individual differences in performance among children on a wide variety of outcome measures that assess speech perception, language comprehension. speech intelligibility, and reading. Some deaf children with cochlear implants do very well on standardized audiological and language tests and appear to be well on their way to acquiring spoken language through their implants, whereas other children do much more poorly and apparently never appear to reach these critical milestones in speech and language development.1 What is the basis for these individual differences? Recent findings suggest that one factor may be related to the perceptual processing of spoken words, that is, the encoding, storage, and retrieval of the phonological representations of spoken words, and the use of working memory and rehearsal mechanisms.1,2 To examine the role of working memory in speech perception, word recognition, speech production, language, and reading tasks, we obtained auditory digit spans from 8- and 9-year-old prelingually deaf children who had used their implants for a period of at least 4 years, then computed correlations between digit span and 4 sets of outcome measures.