Temporal Auditory Resolution, Timed Motor Responses to Auditory Cues, and Phonological Processing in Swedish Children with Cochlear Implants and Normal Hearing Peers

Background: Hearing with a cochlear implant (CI) presents challenges for speech perception, particularly in acoustically complex environments. Auditory temporal resolution, defined as the ability to detect brief changes in an ongoing acoustic signal, is one factor that may contribute to these difficulties. Accurate discrimination of speech sounds is essential for children’s language development and vocabulary acquisition, as subtle temporal variations in speech can alter word meaning. Methods: We investigated the ability to detect brief auditory cues at the millisecond level using a gap detection in noise task. Participants also completed non-verbal tasks (reaction time and finger tapping) and a verbal task (nonword repetition), all of which rely on the perception, processing and timing of brief temporal events. Fifteen children with CI were compared with fifteen matched peers with normal hearing. Results: We found that the children with CI required gaps approximately twice as long as those required by the children with normal hearing. In contrast, they responded significantly faster to simple auditory stimuli. Both groups timed their motor responses equally well to auditory cues. Lastly, the children with CI were outperformed on correctly repeated nonwords by the children with normal hearing. However, their performance varied across different consonant types, possibly affecting the perceptual clarity of the articulation differently. Conclusions: This study explored auditory temporal processing abilities across multiple levels and domains. The findings revealed distinct performance patterns across the different tests. Despite these group differences, the results imply that CIs provide the possibility to perceive brief temporal changes in auditory signals, react fast and time motor responses to auditory cues. The relationships among the different tasks, as well as the extent to which sensitivity to brief acoustic properties contributes to speech processing, require further investigation.