Functional brain alterations following mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss in children
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.
Data availability
Unidentifiable data, stimuli, and statistical analyses scripts are available on https://github.com/acalcus/MMHL.git
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (FP7-607139)
- Axelle Calcus
ESRC National Centre for Research Methods, University of Southampton (RES-061-25-0440)
- Lorna F Halliday
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: Informed consent, and consent to publish was obtained from parents/guardians of the children included in this study. Ethical approval for this study was provided by the UCL Research Ethics Committee (Project ID number: 2109/004).
Copyright
© 2019, Calcus et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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