Nasalance scores of Egyptian hearing impaired children

Context Speech of prelingual hearing impaired (HI) speakers is commonly characterized by the presence of resonance abnormalities which is related with nasality. Aim To investigate and compare nasalance scores of Egyptian HI children including cochlear implant (CI) and hearing aid (HA) users with normal hearing (NH) children. Settings and design It is an observational case–control study. Patients and methods The study consisted of group I: 41 HA children, group II: 24 CI children, and the control group: 31 age-matched and sex-matched children with NH. Nasometer II 6200 was used for evaluation of their nasalance scores. Statistical analysis used IBM SPSS, version 20, was used. Kruskal–Wallis and one-way analysis of variance tests were performed to compare the mean differences between the nasalance scores of the three studied groups. While Mann–Whitney and post-hoc tests were used for pairwise comparison. A correlation analysis was computed between the nasalance scores and many parameters using Spearman's and Pearson's coefficients. Results For oral sentence, both CI and HA children showed higher nasalance values in comparison with NH children. However, lower nasalance scores were observed for the nasal sentence. CI experience and enrollment into language therapy were found to have an effect on nasalance scores. Conclusion Resonance quality of the HI children is still at risk despite the fact that a significant number of them demonstrate normal resonance.