HRC Seminar: Amanda Griffin

Title: Effects of Pediatric Unilateral Hearing Loss on Speech Recognition, Auditory Comprehension, and Quality of Life. Abstract: A growing body of research is challenging long-held assumptions that pediatric unilateral hearing loss (UHL) has minimal detrimental effects on children's development. It is now well understood that children with UHL are at risk for speech and language delays, psychosocial issues, and academic underachievement. Despite this recognition, audiological service provision in this population has suffered from insufficient evidence of objective benefit from the variety of interventions that are available. Relatively few studies have expressly focused on understanding the variability in auditory abilities within this special population, which is imperative to inform intervention strategies. The current talk will briefly review the existing literature on global outcomes and then focus on newer auditory research exploring the effects of UHL on masked sentence recognition in a variety of target/masker spatial configurations, auditory comprehension in quiet and in noise, and hearing-related quality of life in school-aged children.