The Surprising Performance of Present-Day Cochlear Implants

The speech reception performance of a recipient of the Clarion CII implant was evaluated with a comprehensive set of tests. The same tests were administered for a group of six subjects with normal hearing. Scores for the implant subject were not different from the scores for the normal-hearing subjects, for seven of the nine tests, including the most difficult test used in standard clinical practice. These results are both surprising and encouraging, in that the implant provides only a very crude mimicking of only some aspects of the normal physiology