Hearing Impairment In Infants Research Articles

Identifying hearing impairment in infants and young children.

Identifying hearing impairment in infants and young children.

Managing the Infant Hearing Impairment Problem: The Contributions of Industry

Managing the Infant Hearing Impairment Problem: The Contributions of Industry

Infant-Adult Differences in Unmasked Thresholds for the Discrimination of Consonant-Vowel Syllable Pairs

Speech sound discrimination thresholds were obtained for two speech sound contrasts (/ba/ vs. /da/ and /ba/ vs. /ga/) for infant and adult subjects. The stimuli were computer-generated synthetic tokens. An adaptive (one-up, one-down) threshold procedure was used with the visual reinforcement infant speech discrimination procedure for the infant subjects. Adults were tested using the same apparatus and threshold-tracking protocol as the infants. There was a 28-dB difference in threshold for discrimination of /ba/ versus /da/ and a 25-dB difference in threshold for discrimination of /ba/versus/ga/ between the infants and the adults. The differences reveal that to reach a criterion level of performance on a simple speech perception task, infants require much greater stimulus intensity than do adults. This has implications for our understanding of normal auditory development, for our notions of hearing impairment in infants and for the role of intensity in research studies of infant speech perception.

Screening for Hearing Impairment in Infants and Young Children

Screening for Hearing Impairment in Infants and Young Children

Delayed Evoked Otoacoustic Emissions - An Ideal Screening Test for Excluding Hearing Impairment in Infants

A screening test is badly needed with which cochlear hearing impairment in small children and newborns can be detected. Delayed evoked otoacoustic emissions (DEOAEs) have been found in laboratory research to be a very useful tool to test the normality of cochlear preprocessing. The characteristics of a simple apparatus for clinical use to measure DEOAEs are described together with typical examples of emissions. Many case studies have already demonstrated the clinical usefulness of DEOAEs in neonates and small children. Five cases are explained in detail and the advantages of such an early screening test discussed.

Developmental Test of Auditory Function: Its Clinical use and Application to Early Identification of Hearing Impairment

A developmental test of auditory function was devised in terms of developmental neurology to aid in the early detection and assessment of hearing impairment in infants. The data used for the development of the test were collected from one hundred and ninty-four normal-hearing infants ranging from birth to fifteen months of age.The purpose of the test is to evaluate development of auditory function in infants involving detection, discrimination, recognition and comprehension of sounds and speech by using a scale of auditory responses. The scale consists of fourtyfive check items placed on a developmental continuum. The testing procedure is very simple: mothers are asked to check auditory responses of their own infant at home using the scale prior to audiological and otological examinations.Auditory tests including the developmental test of auditory function, behavioral observation audiometry and brainstem evoked response audiometry were performed on approximately fifty infants who needed audiological examination because of poverty of auditory response to enviromental sounds and human voices. The developmental test of auditory function was also applied to the auditory screening of 1173 infants who visited a health center in Tokyo to undergo health examinations during a period from February 1976 to July 1977. The results obtained indicated that combinations of the three differeent kinds of auditory tests such as behavioral, electrophysiological and developmental tests are the most adequate way of assessing auditory abilities in infants. The developmental test of auditory function can be a simple and useful means for the early detection and assessment of hearing impairment.