JAAA CEU Program

Questions refer to Tamati et al, “High- and Low-Performing Adult Cochlear Implant Users on High-Variability Sentence Recognition: Differences in Auditory Spectral Resolution and Neurocognitive Functioning,“ 324–335.

Learner Outcomes

Readers of this article should be able to:

• Understand that both auditory sensitivity and neurocognitive skills contribute to speech-recognition diff erences among postlingually deafened adult cochlear implant (CI) users.

• Consider that auditory spectral resolution may play the most important and limiting role for low-performing CI users.

CEU Questions

1. Which factor is not associated with diff erences in spectral resolution and speech recognition in postlingually deafened adult CI users?

   • Patient's residual hearing

   • Patient's gender

   • Patient's duration of deafness

2. What is meant by “top-down” processing in the context of CI users?

   • The capacity of individual CI users to make use of neurocognitive processes and language knowledge to understand the degraded sensory information

   • Diff erences in sensory input related to the CI device

   • Eff ects of adverse listening conditions on CI users

3. Compared to high-performing CI users, low-performing CI users are more susceptible to:

   • Sources of signal degradation, including noise and speech variability

   • Practice eff ects associated with repeated assessments

   • Hard-device failures

4. The Perceptually Robust English Sentence Test Open-set (PRESTO) materials have been shown to:

   • Be less challenging to recognize than sentence materials with lower talker variability

   • Minimize talker variability by incorporating fewer talkers, genders, and regional accents

   • Yield large individual diff erences in performance related to several neurocognitive skills

5. Results from this study showed that the highperforming and low-performing CI groups were primarily discriminated by which scores?

   • Spectral-Temporally Modulated Ripple Test (SMRT)

   • California Verbal Learning Test, Version II (CVLT)

   • Test of Word Reading Effi ciency, Version 2 (TOWRE)

6. In the cohort of CI users in this study, which variable was most predictive of the CI users' performance on PRESTO?

   • Verbal learning and memory

   • Lexical/phonological processing speed

   • Auditory spectral resolution

7. Neurocognitive abilities also contributed to discriminating between high- and low-performing CI groups, as evidenced by results on which assessment of nonverbal reasoning?

   • TOWRE

   • Raven's Progressive Matrices Test

   • CVLT

8. Overall results suggest that:

   • Only auditory spectral resolution contributes to discriminating between high- and low-performing CI groups

   • Only neurocognitive skills contribute to discriminating between high- and low-performing CI groups

   • Both neurocognitive functioning and auditory spectral resolution contribute to discriminating between high- and low-performing CI groups

9. With reduced sensory input, listeners tend to use perceptual strategies relying on:

   • “top-down” processing

   • “bottom-up” processing

   • Guesswork

10. The ability to engage neurocognitive resources to compensate for a degraded signal is likely to be:

    • Reduced for CI users with the best spectral resolution

    • Reduced for CI users with poor spectral resolution

    • Not related to a CI user's spectral resolution

No conflict of interest has been declared by the author(s).