| Description |
Nearly 300 million people worldwide have moderate to profound hearing loss. Hearing impairment, if not adequately managed, has strong socioeconomic and affective impact on individuals. Cochlear implants have
become the most effective vehicle for helping profoundly deaf children and adults to understand spoken language, to be sensitive to environmental sounds, and, to some extent, to listen to music. The auditory information delivered by the cochlear implant remains non-optimal for speech perception because it de-livers a spectrally degraded signal and lacks some of the fine temporal acoustic structure.
In this presentation, I will discuss research revealing the multimodal nature of speech perception in nor-mally-hearing individuals, with important inter-subject variability in the weighting of auditory or visual information. I will also discuss how audio-visual training, via Cued Speech, can improve speech percep-tion in cochlear implantees, particularly in noisy contexts. Cued Speech is a system that makes use of visual information from speechreading combined with hand shapes positioned in different places around the face in order to deliver completely unambiguous information about the syllables and the phonemes of spoken language. I will discuss arguments supporting that the exposure to Cued Speech before or af-ter the implantation could be important in the aural rehabilitation process of cochlear implantees. I will describe five lines of research that are converging to support the view that Cued Speech can enhance speech perception in individuals with cochlear implants.
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