Unilateral Hearing Loss Essay

This study investigated central auditory processing in unilateral hearing loss, due to the very limited studies investigating unilateral hearing loss’ effects on auditory processing. It is known that profound deafness in known to greatly reduce neural activity in the auditory nerve. However, in the past unilateral hearing loss was considered to be of little consequence because normal speech and language development will still occur through the normal hearing ear. Some researchers though, have found that children with severe-profound unilateral hearing loss often have auditory perceptual problems, like understanding speech in noise, limited localization, and so on. These children typically have deficits in speech recognition, academic performance, behavior, and may have low energy or high stress. Evaluation of these skills/deficits in this study was done through a P300 recording in response to speech and tones. Researchers considered both …show more content…
Often unilateral hearing loss is not discovered until later in life when problems arise. Knowing that speech processing is vulnerable to the effects of unilateral hearing loss could be vital to intervention and rehabilitation in those children with a unilateral loss.
Overall, I feel this study covered a very important topic and did so in a successful manner. A larger study size would have been beneficial to further prove the effects of unilateral hearing loss on the P300 latency responses to speech stimuli. I also feel studies looking at whether early intervention could lessen these effects would be interesting. If so, then a strong case could be made for intervention in cases of children with unilateral hearing loss. This could potentially reduces the effects their hearing loss could have on speech processing, academics, stress, etc. later in