New experiment proves that babies with CIs will develop as well as hearing children
New experiments carried out by Australian researchers back up existing evidence that brain activity in deaf children develops normally if they are fitted with a cochlear implant at a young age.
With a view to finding out how a CI's stimulation affects the brain, Rob Shephard of the Bionic Ear Institute, and his colleagues recorded electrical activity in the cortex of 17 8-month-old cats that were deaf from birth.
The researchers activated each cat’s cochlear implant while monitoring their brains, reports New Scientist magazine.
They said that 10 of the cats had received the implant recently, and their electrical activity was scrambled, indicating that they didn't perceive sound coherently: normal cortex activity is key to perceiving sound and, in humans, to developing speech.
However, in the seven cats that received implants at eight weeks old, brain activity was similar to that in hearing cats.
Shephard says that this finding explains how deaf children given implants as babies can learn to speak almost as well as hearing children.
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