Listening Difficulties in Children With Normal Audiograms: Relation to Hearing and Cognition

This report is an overview of the SICLiD study and focuses on the children’s behavioral performance. The overall goals of SICLiD were to understand the auditory and other neural mechanisms underlying childhood listening difficulties and translate that understanding into clinical assessment and, ultimately, intervention. Design: Cross-sectional behavioral assessment of children with “listening difficulties” and an age-matched “typically developing” control group. Caregivers completed the ECLiPS, and the resulting total standardized composite score formed the basis of further descriptive statistics, univariate, and multivariate modeling of experimental data. Results: All scores of the ECLiPS, the SCAN-3:C, a standardized clinical test suite for auditory processing, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Cognition Toolbox were significantly lower for children with listening difficulties than for their typically developing peers using group comparisons via t-tests and Wilcoxon Rank-Sum tests. A similar effect was observed on the Listening in Spatialized Noise—Sentences (LiSN-S) test for speech sentence-in-noise intelligibility but only reached significance for the Low Cue and High Cue conditions and the Talker Advantage derived score. Stepwise regression to examine the factors contributing to the ECLiPS Total scaled score (pooled across groups) yielded a model that explained 42% of its variance based on the SCAN-3:C composite, LiSN-S Talker Advantag...
Source: Ear and Hearing - Category: Audiology Tags: Research Article Source Type: research