Does single-ear deafness affect children?

As we all know, ears are very important to us. Among school-age children, 1 in 20 suffers from unilateral hearing loss. However, it is traditionally believed that as long as children still have one normal ear, their speech and language abilities can function normally. , not affected. In fact, this is not the case, because hearing loss in one ear affects children's ability to understand and use language, and becomes a huge obstacle to their growth. We know that children who are deaf in one ear are not as good as hearing children, at least in terms of spoken language.



Does single-ear deafness affect children?
"Listening" with only one ear is the most common manifestation of asymmetric hearing loss. This hearing loss can be unilateral hearing loss or bilateral hearing loss to varying degrees. Long-term failure to intervene in asymmetric hearing loss will cause children to gradually develop a series of serious impairments.

In addition to hearing loss, these symptoms also include obvious language development delays, intellectual disabilities, communication disorders, etc. Clinically, asymmetric hearing loss is defined as a difference of 15dB HL between the average hearing thresholds of the two ears or a difference of more than 20% in the speech recognition rate of the two ears.

However, the manifestations of asymmetric hearing loss are often not obvious. When children have asymmetric hearing loss in childhood, parents often complain because of the following reasons: I disagree with this:
1. The hearing loss in children is not obvious in the early stages. It is not until the children gradually develop learning disabilities, social and emotional difficulties that they gradually show hearing loss, and parents are not aware of this.
2. After hearing screening, it is found that the child has hearing loss, but the parents believe that the child can still hear sounds with the help of the sound ear, and there is no need to take intervention measures. Research shows that asymmetric hearing loss will affect the development of the auditory pathway in the brain. , which in turn causes the worse ear to show more obvious damage. If parents do not intervene, it will cause children to show more obvious hearing loss and other intellectual development disabilities during their development.



Hearing
1. Long-term reliance on one ear for listening will gradually worsen the hearing loss of the worse ear, causing auditory deprivation and affecting the auditory pathway. development.

2. Unable to locate the sound source when listening with one ear. 3. Obvious hearing loss in noisy environment, unable to hear the target language clearly when multiple people are talking.

Linguistic intelligence
1. Language development is delayed.
2. Compared with children of the same age, they are more likely to be unable to understand vocabulary and simple grammatical structures.

3. Academic performance declines, and more emotional and communication disorders occur.

Doctors paired 74 children aged 6 to 12 with hearing loss in one ear with a brother or sister to avoid the influence of other variables such as environment and genes. The researchers tested the children's oral and written language skills. The test results showed that single-ear deafnessChildren's scores were lower than the average for hearing children, indicating that single-hearing deafness has a significant impact on these children. When analyzing the family backgrounds of these single-deaf children, researchers found that these children's families were in more difficult circumstances and their mothers had lower education levels. A large number of studies have proven that these factors can seriously affect children's language development and educational level.

As mentioned earlier in this article, the authors of the study also believe that although we still lack effective methods to treat and help single-hearing deaf children, more importantly, we must be fully aware of The serious dangers of single-ear deafness must not be ignored just because there is a straight ear.

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