Abstract
Auditory deprivation in the form of deafness during development leads to lasting changes in central auditory system function. However, less is known about the effects of mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss (MMHL) during development. Here, we used a longitudinal design to examine late auditory evoked responses and mismatch responses to nonspeech and speech sounds for children with MMHL. At Time 1, younger children with MMHL (8-12 years; n = 23) showed age-appropriate mismatch negativities (MMNs) to sounds, but older children (12-16 years; n = 23) did not. Six years later, we re-tested a subset of the younger (now older) children with MMHL (n = 13). Children who had shown significant MMNs at Time 1 showed MMNs that were reduced and, for nonspeech, absent at Time 2. Our findings demonstrate that even a mild-to-moderate hearing loss during early-to-mid childhood can lead to changes in the neural processing of sounds in late childhood/adolescence.
Highlights
The structure and function of the adult auditory system is dependent upon stimulation received during maturation (Kral and Sharma, 2012)
As is typical for younger normally hearing (NH) children in this age range (Sussman et al, 2008), the late auditory evoked responses (LAERs) to standards for the NH-Y subgroup was dominated by a large positivity, occurring around 100 ms post-stimulus-onset (P1), followed by a large, prolonged negativity from around 150-600 ms (N2)
For the NH-O subgroup, the LAER was characterised by a P1, N1 (~130 ms), P2 (~180 ms), and N2 (~250-300 ms), which were marked for the nonspeech condition
Summary
The structure and function of the adult auditory system is dependent upon stimulation received during maturation (Kral and Sharma, 2012). Animal studies have shown marked differences in the anatomy, physiology, and functionality of the central auditory pathway following cochlear ablation, pharmacological neonatal deafening, and congenital deafness (Berger et al, 2017; Shepherd and Hardie, 2001; see Butler and Lomber, 2013, for a review). There is evidence to suggest that even transient or mild levels of hearing loss during a critical period can lead to lasting effects in the central and peripheral auditory system (e.g. Gravel et al, 2006; Rosen et al, 2012; Takesian et al, 2012; Liberman et al, 2015; Mowery et al, 2015). We examine the effects of MMHL on the development of auditory cortical functioning in children
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