Every day I work with adults receiving cochlear implants (CIs). Choosing an implant is a major decision, so, quite understandably, recipients and their families want to know how much benefit they can expect to get. Unfortunately, this is not a straightforward question to answer.With a cochlear implant, even if everything goes right, we still cannot predict how well an adult will hear. There is a vast range of speech perception outcomes. Some users will be able to use the telephone easily and obtain 100 percent on a sentence test without lipreading, others will be unable to understand any speech without lipreading, and still others will find themselves somewhere in between.The question is, would it be easier for adults to make the decision to have an implant if we could even roughly predict how well they may hear afterward?
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