Speaking intelligibly is an important achievement in children’s language development. How far do congenitally severe-to-profound hearing-impaired children who received a cochlear implant (CI) in the first two years of their life advance on the path to intelligibility in comparison to children with typical hearing (NH)? Spontaneous speech samples of children with CI and children with NH were orthographically transcribed by naïve transcribers. The entropy of the transcriptions was computed to analyze their degree of uniformity. The same samples were also rated on a continuous rating scale by another group of adult listeners. The transcriptions of the NH children’s speech were more uniform, i.e., had significantly lower entropy, than those of the CI children, suggesting that the latter group displayed lower intelligibility. This was confirmed by the ratings on the continuous scale. Despite the relatively restricted age ranges, older children reached better intelligibility scores in both groups.

能说清楚是儿童语言发展的重要成就。与具有典型听力 (NH) 的儿童相比，在生命的头两年接受人工耳蜗植入 (CI) 的先天性重度至极重度听力受损儿童在可懂度的道路上进步了多少？CI 儿童和 NH 儿童的自发语音样本由天真的转录员正字法转录。计算转录的熵以分析它们的均匀度。同样的样本也由另一组成年听众在连续评分量表上进行评分。与 CI 儿童相比，NH 儿童语音的转录更均匀，即熵显着降低，表明后者表现出较低的可懂度。连续量表的评级证实了这一点。尽管年龄范围相对有限，但年龄较大的儿童在两组中都达到了更好的可理解性分数。