Context
Speech of prelingual hearing impaired (HI) speakers is commonly characterized by the presence
of resonance abnormalities which is related with nasality.
Aim
To investigate and compare nasalance scores of Egyptian HI children including cochlear
implant (CI) and hearing aid (HA) users with normal hearing (NH) children.
Settings and design
It is an observational case–control study.
Patients and methods
The study consisted of group I: 41 HA children, group II: 24 CI children, and the control group:
31 age‑matched and sex‑matched children with NH. Nasometer II 6200 was used for evaluation
of their nasalance scores.
Statistical analysis used
IBM SPSS, version 20, was used. Kruskal–Wallis and one‑way analysis of variance tests
were performed to compare the mean differences between the nasalance scores of the three
studied groups. While Mann–Whitney and post‑hoc tests were used for pairwise comparison.
A correlation analysis was computed between the nasalance scores and many parameters
using Spearman’s and Pearson’s coefficients.
Results
For oral sentence, both CI and HA children showed higher nasalance values in comparison
with NH children. However, lower nasalance scores were observed for the nasal sentence. CI
experience and enrollment into language therapy were found to have an effect on nasalance
scores.
Conclusions
Resonance quality of the HI children is still at risk despite the fact that a significant number of
them demonstrate normal resonance.