Impact of Hearing Aids on Language Outcomes in Preschool Children With Mild Bilateral Hearing Loss.
Yu-Chen Hung, Pei-Hsuan Ho, Pei-Hua Chen and 3 others
PMID 38773778WHAT IT FOUND
Preschoolers with mild bilateral hearing loss who used hearing aids had better language scores than those who did not.
However, hearing aid users also received speech therapy, so the specific benefit of the devices alone cannot be separated from the therapy.
Key findings
01Children with mild bilateral hearing loss who used hearing aids had significantly better language comprehension, oral expression, and overall language development scores than those who did not use hearing aids.
02The use of hearing aids was a significant predictor of language performance, explaining between 11.6% and 14.8% of the variance in scores.
03Among hearing aid users, the aided pure tone average of the better ear was the only significant predictor of language comprehension scores.
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What it does not show
All children in the hearing aid group also received speech or auditory-verbal therapy, making it impossible to separate the effect of the hearing aids from the effect of the therapy. The study is observational, not randomised, so other unmeasured factors could influence the results. The hearing aid group had significantly worse unaided hearing thresholds than the non-hearing aid group at baseline. The sample size is relatively small, particularly for the subgroup analyses.
Declared interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest. The study was funded by the Children's Hearing Foundation and Zi Ji Zhong Limited. The funders were not involved in the study design, data collection, analysis, or writing.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that hearing aids alone caused the improved language scores. Every child in the hearing aid group also received speech or auditory-verbal therapy, so the specific contribution of the devices versus the therapy cannot be determined from this study.