Although unilateral cochlear implants generally provide good speech understanding under quiet conditions, patients with unilateral cochlear implants frequently report difficulty in understanding speech in the presence of background noise and difficulty in localizing the source of sound. Since these two listening functions require binaural hearing in normal hearing individuals, there has been a growing interest in bilateral cochlear implants as intervention type for people with severe-to-profound bilateral hearing loss. This study investigated the outcomes of bilateral cochlear implants in all the adult recipients of the Pretoria Cochlear Implant Program. All the subjects with BCIs were asked to choose a significant other person to participate in the study. All the subjects (i.e. subjects with BCIs and their significant other people) were asked to participate in a semi-structured interview and to fill out a researcher-generated questionnaire. The subjects with BCIs also underwent audiometric testing. The majority of the subjects with BCIs were found to demonstrate improved ability to understand speech in the presence of background noise and, to some extent, in their ability to localize sound sources. As both quantitative and qualitative methods were used to determine the outcomes, it could be demonstrated that the majority of adult bilateral cochlear implant recipients gain from the auditory benefits in everyday listening situations. The majority of subjects and their significant other people conferred that their improved auditory skills allow them to be more participative in social, cultural, and other activities, which add to the quality of their lives. / Dissertation (MCommunication Pathology)--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology / Unrestricted

The duration of construction of a project depends on many factors, such as: cost, location, site characteristics, procurement methods, area of construction, footprint of the building and its height, etc. It is very important to be able to predict these durations accurately in order to successfully complete a project on time. Various construction duration estimation tools have been developed to make accurate predictions, as &ldquo / time is money.&rdquo / The main objective of this study was to develop a model that can be used to predict the construction duration of a project in a reliable and practical way. Contractors can thus use a project&#039 / s characteristics, as given in the tender documents, to estimate the actual amount time it would take them to complete the construction works. In this study, factors affecting the duration of a construction project and models for estimating construction durations were investigated. Within this framework, duration estimation models such as / Bromilow&rsquo / s Time-Cost (BTC) Model and Building Cost Information Service (BCIS) Model were used while Simple Linear Regression (SLR) and Multiple Linear Regression (MLR) analyses were conducted on data related to seven case study buildings that are situated at the Middle East Technical University (METU) campus in Ankara. This data was obtained from the Department of Construction and Technical Works (DCTW) at METU. The closeness in estimation of the regression analyses was investigated and finally an MLR model was obtained which was based on two parameters / the area of the building and the area of its fa&ccedil / ade. On the other hand, as opposed to studies reported in literature, the effect of cost on duration was not seen to be significant.