The impact of aided speech audibility and auditory perception in language development of children with sensorineural hearing loss

Although there have now been several international large-scale longitudinal studies assessing outcomes for children with hearing loss, there is no current data for the UK population and current studies have not looked specifically at the role of auditory perception in predicting language outcomes. This doctoral proposal stems from a programme of work that is being undertaken at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (CBU), University of Cambridge, as part of Dr Lorna Halliday's MRC Senior Fellowship in Hearing Research, which will examine the communication, language, social, emotional and behavioural (SEB), and academic abilities of a cohort of primary-school age children with mild-to-profound SNHL who were identified at the newborn screen. For this doctoral proposal we will specifically investigate the impact of audiological factors in language development of children with SNHL. children aged 4-11 years will complete an ageappropriate battery of standardised and experimental psychometric and psychophysical assessments at two intervals. We hypothesize that oral language abilities will be predicted by audiological factors such as aided audibility and type of technology fitted as well as auditory processing measures. We would expect better performance on these measures to be associated with better outcomes in this group of children.