Hearing, speech reception, vocabulary and language: population epidemiology and concordance in Australian children aged 11 to 12 years and their parents

Abstract

ObjectivesTo describe the epidemiology and parent-child concordance of hearing, speech reception, vocabulary and language in Australian parent-child dyads at child age 11 to 12 years.DesignPopulation-based cross-sectional study (Child Health CheckPoint) nested within the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children.SettingAssessment centres in seven Australian cities and eight regional towns or home visits around Australia, February 2015 to March 2016.ParticipantsOf all participating CheckPoint families (n=1874), 1516 children (50% female) and 1520 parents (87% mothers, mean age 43.8 years) undertook at least one of four measurements of hearing and language.Outcome measuresHearing threshold (better ear mean of 1, 2 and 4 kHz) from pure-tone audiometry, speech reception threshold, receptive vocabulary, expressive and receptive languages using a sentence repetition task. Parent-child concordance was examined using Pearson’s correlation coefficients and adjusted linear regression models. Survey weights and methods accounted for Longitudinal Study of Australian Children’s complex sampling and stratification.ResultsChildren had a similar speech reception threshold to parents (children mean −14.3, SD 2.4; parents −14.9, SD 3.2 dB) but better hearing acuity (children 8.3, SD 6.3; parents 13.4, SD 7.0 decibels hearing level). Standardised sentence repetition scores were similar (children 9.8, SD 2.9; parents 9.1, SD 3.3) but, as expected, parents had superior receptive vocabularies. Parent-child correlations were higher for the cognitively-based language measures (vocabulary 0.31, 95% CI 0.26 to 0.36; sentence repetition 0.29, 95% CI 0.24 to 0.34) than the auditory measures (hearing 0.18, 95% CI 0.13 to 0.23; speech reception threshold 0.18, 95% CI 0.13 to 0.22). Mother-child and father-child concordances were similar for all measures.ConclusionsWe provide population reference values for multiple measures spanning auditory and verbal communication systems in children and mid-life adults. Concordance values aligned with previous twin studies and offspring studies in adults, in keeping with polygenic heritability that is modest for audition but around 60% for language by late childhood.