Peripheral Auditory Involvement in Childhood Listening Difficulty.
Lisa L Hunter, Chelsea M Blankenship, Li Lin and 4 others
PMID 32740300WHAT IT FOUND
Children with listening difficulty did not differ from typically developing children on sensitive hearing tests.
A history of ear tubes, not the listening difficulty itself, was associated with poorer hearing above 8 kHz.
Key findings
01Children with caregiver-reported listening difficulty did not differ from typically developing children on overall hearing thresholds.
02The two groups did not differ on middle ear tests, cochlear emission tests, or middle ear reflex thresholds.
03A history of ear tubes, not the parent-reported listening-difficulty score, was the significant predictor of poorer hearing above 8 kHz and altered cochlear emission and middle ear reflex test results.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study used caregiver-reported listening difficulty from the ECLiPS questionnaire rather than a consensus auditory processing disorder diagnosis, and only 16 of the 60 listening-difficulty children had a positive APD diagnosis. The groups differed in race, with more African American children in the listening-difficulty group and more white children in the typically developing group. Children with any standard hearing loss above 20 dB HL were excluded, so the results do not apply to children with abnormal pure-tone audiograms. The paper reports peripheral auditory tests, not speech-in-noise, classroom listening, or communication outcomes, so it cannot show whether these tests predict functional difficulty. The study is observational, so associations with ear-tube history cannot establish causation.
Declared interests
The supplied article text does not include a conflicts-of-interest or funding declaration; the metadata lists research support from a non-U.S. government source.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that listening difficulty is caused by subtle peripheral hearing loss. The children with listening difficulty and the typically developing children did not differ on the sensitive peripheral tests, and poorer hearing above 8 kHz was linked to ear-tube history in both groups rather than to the listening-difficulty score.