Functional brain alterations following mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss in children

Abstract
Data availability
Article and author information
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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

The following data sets were generated

1. Calcus A
2. Tuomainen O
3. Campos A
4. Rosen S
5. Halliday L
(2019) Functional Brain Alterations Following Mild-to-Moderate Sensorineural Hearing Loss in Children
GitHub, acalcus/MMHL.git.

https://github.com/acalcus/MMHL

Article and author information

Author details

Axelle Calcus

Département d'Etudes Cognitives, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France

For correspondence
axelle.calcus@ens.fr

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-1240-1122
Outi Tuomainen

Department of Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences, University College London, London, United Kingdom

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Ana Campos

Department of Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences, University College London, London, United Kingdom

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Stuart Rosen

Department of Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences, University College London, London, United Kingdom

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Lorna F Halliday

Department of Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences, University College London, London, United Kingdom

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

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

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.