Unilateral Hearing Impairment in Children

Abstract

An overview and update are offered on difficulties experienced by children with monaural sensorineural deafness. It is the general consensus that children with unilateral hearing loss experience few, if any, communication and/or educational problems. The medical and educational status of a group (N = 60) of children with unilateral, hearing impairment are described. In addition, the auditory, linguistic, and behavioral manifestations of unilateral hearing impairment were studied in considerable detail for a subsample of these 60 children. The results revealed that approximately one third of the children with unilateral hearing loss had failed at least one grade. Nearly 50% of the group had either failed a grade and/or needed resource assistance in the schools. The small subsample of children with unilateral hearing loss performed much poorer than a matched group of children with normal hearing on both a localization and a syllable recognition task. Finally, the data on behavioral and linguistic manifestations of monaural hearing loss indicate that children with unilateral hearing impairment are experiencing more problems than previously supposed.