Auditory and Vestibular Research Journal
Year:2017 | Volume:26 | Issue:3|Papers Count:8

Background and Aim: In the last few decades, the total number of preterm newborns, with gestational age less than 35 weeks, who survived the prematurity conditions, has increased significantly. This might lead to a high prevalence of late neurocognitive and developmental abnormalities. The neurological development is close-ly related to the hearing and language acquisition, these factors play a crucial role in social and emotional growth. The present review emphasizes the consequences of preterm birth on neurodevelopment, speech-language, and auditory system.Recent Findings: The relationship between the preterm birth and neural developmental indicates that prematurity could lead to a higher risk of cerebral palsy, developmental delay, and mental retardation as compared to the birth at term. The preterm newborns would be deprived of normally enriched hearing experience during the length of hospital stay, which is markedly different from that of the typical full-term newborns. This altered hearing ability might impede the early normal development of auditory neural pathways in preterm children, posing serious concerns about the acquisition of speech and language skills as compared to their normal peers.Conclusion: Alterations in auditory and higher cortical functions in preterm children can lead to suboptimal cognition and language skills. In order to prevent and mitigate these consequences, a long-term follow-up of neurodevelopment, auditory, and linguistic abilities is pro-posed to fully recognize the sources of problems, and if necessary, implement the intervention programs.

Background and Aim: Adolescence is an extremely challenging and difficult age for individuals. Notably, adolescents with deafness face greater challenges as their communication skills and access to information, especially the information regarding their social world are limited. Moreover, stereotyped and biased attitudes lead them to focus more on their deafness than their own identities as teenagers. Therefore, in this article, we reviewed self-esteem and its components in the lives of adolescents with deafness.Recent Findings: According to our review of published articles, various factors might affect the development of self-esteem in adolescents with deafness, including parents’ choices about their children’s hearing device, choice of educational setting, mode of communication, the relationship of adolescents with deafness with their parents, having a supporting peer group, presence or absence of other disabilities, willingness to search for the etiology of their disease, and so on.Conclusion: Collecting information regarding self-identity, self-esteem, and psychosocial issues of adolescents with deafness should be included in their educational programs so that their mental health shaped appropriately and their transition from adolescence to adulthood facilitated and psychosocial issues prevented. The transition from adolescence to adulthood is more complex in deaf and hard of hearing people, and requires special attention.

Background and Aim: Sound processors in cochlear implant (CI) cannot encode low frequency information and discard much of the temporal fine structure required to perceive fundamental frequency. Hearing aids can transmit low frequency information, which is important for pitch perception and provides many advantages for the users. This study aimed to compare aural/oral performance of bimodal cochlear implants with unilateral ones in children using parents' evaluation of aural/oral performance of children (PEACH) questionnaire. Methods: Twenty children with unilateral cochlear implant and 20 ones with bimodal cochlear implants were selected for this study. Of them, 23 had cochlear devices, 10 possessed Med-El ones, and 7 wore advanced bionics ones. Bimodal group had at least 7 months of hearing experience with digital hearing aid in non-implanted ear. In order to compare the aural/ oral performance in these groups, we used the PEACH questionnaire. Results: In unilateral and bimodal groups, age of implantation and age of testing and hearing experience before CI use were not significantly different. However, there was a significant difference in quiet score, noise score, and total score between unilateral and bimodal groups (p<0.05). Conclusion: In bimodal group, aural/oral performance was significantly improved in quiet and noise situations in comparison with unilateral group. This improvement is due to the advantage of binaural processing and low frequency information provided by the hearing aid.

Background and Aim: The video head-impulse test (vHIT) is a useful clinical tool to measure vestibule-ocular reflex (VOR) gain that is defined as the ratio of eye velocity to head velocity. Although normative data are available for VOR gain, most studies only report horizontal semi-circular canal VOR in adults and overlooked children. Hence, this study aimed at establishing normative VOR data for 6-12 years old children.Methods: Vestibulo ocular reflex gain in horizontal and vertical planes was assessed on 60 healthy children without a history of balance and hearing problems using sudden, fast, and unpredictable head impulses.Results: The mean and standard deviation of VOR gains were 0.99 (0.05), 0.98 (0.06), and 0.93 (0.06) for horizontal, anterior, and posterior canals, respectively. Gain differences between genders were not statistically significant.Conclusion: The simplicity and tolerability of vHIT in children showed that it can be used as a screening tool to diagnose vestibular disorders in children. In addition, it was seen that mean VOR gain is greater in horizontal canal than vertical canal.

Background and Aim: As the acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) helps improve psychological well-being, the effectiveness of this approach has drawn the attention of many researchers recently. This study aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of ACT on psychological well-being and anger reduction among mothers with deaf children in Tehran.Methods: Thirty mothers of deaf children, who met the inclusion criteria, were randomly divided into control and experimental groups (15 women per group). For the experimental group, ten sessions of ACT on anger reduction were held, whereas the control group received no education in this respect. Their psychological well-being level and anger reduction level were evaluated before and after the intervention using Ryff scales of psychological well-being and the multidimensional anger inventory (MAI), respectively.Results: The ACT affected the psychological well-being and anger reduction among mothers with deaf children and persisted at follow-up (p<0.001).Conclusion: This study indicates the importance of using these interventions in the case of mothers with deaf children and providing new horizons in the interventions. In other words, ACT has a performance compatible with many variables.

Background and Aim: The quick speech in noise (Q-SIN) test results have been reported to be entirely different in monolinguals compared to bilinguals. We attempted to assess the reliability and equivalency of the Persian Q-SIN test in Azeri-Persian bilinguals.Methods: The Q-SIN test was performed on 51 Persian monolinguals and 51 Azeri-Persian bilinguals by the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 5th lists binaurally under headphone. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) loss was determined for each group. The reliability was evaluated on 30 bilinguals.Results: There was no gender effect on all results in both groups. The mean SNR losses of four lists were -1.19 and -0.8dB in monolinguals and bilinguals, respectively, also they were within normal limits in both groups. The mean SNR losses for all lists in monolinguals were better than those in bilinguals, but there was a significant difference between two groups for list 1 (p=0.03). No significant differences were observed between two runs for lists 1, 3, and 5 in bilinguals, and two runs for lists 1, 2, and 5 were significantly correlated. There were no significant differences between the scores of lists 2, 3, and 5 in bilinguals (p>0.000), and a moderate correlation existed between lists 2 and 3.Conclusion: The scores of lists 2, 3, and 5 in bilinguals are similar to those in monolinguals. In bilinguals, lists 1 and 5 are reliable, and lists 2 and 3 are equivalent. The overall results indicate limitations in both reliability and equivalency of Persian Q-SIN lists in the bilinguals.

Background and Aim: Several research studies indicate that children born with disabilities imp-air the general health of their parents. Therefore, it is necessary to address the emotional and psychological needs of parents of children with dis-abilities through rehabilitation programs. For this reason, the purpose of the present study was to investigate the effectiveness of family-centered early intervention based on psychological well-being on the general health of mothers of children with hearing impairment.Methods: Thirty-two mothers of children with hearing impairment were selected through convenience sampling and randomly assigned to experimental (n=16) and control groups (n=16). The general health of both groups was assessed by general health questionnaire (GHQ) before the intervention as a pretest. The experimental group then participated in 12 sessions of family-centered early intervention program based on psychological well-being, while the control group did not take part. After the experimental group completed the intervention, the general health of both groups was assessed by GHQ as the post-test.Results: Analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) and multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) showed significant decreases in mean scores on general health and in the subscales (somatic symptoms, anxiety, social dysfunction, and depression) by the experimental group (p<0.05).Conclusion: The findings indicated that family-centered early intervention based on psycho-logical well-being improved the general health symptoms in mothers of children with hearing impairment. Therefore, a method was proposed which designed and implemented this kind of early intervention to improve the general health of mothers of children with hearing impairment.

Background and Aim: An interesting area of research in deaf studies concerns the idea that various language components and particularly different functional categories such as ten-se, mood, and agreement are not impaired to the same extent. The present study aimed to explore the performance of Persian speaking deaf individuals on tests dealing with five functional categories, namely complementizer/Wh-words, tense, aspect, mood, and agreement.Methods: This research was a cross-sectional study with two groups, first of which included 11 (4 boys and 7 girls) profoundly deaf students with hearing loss above 90 dB for both ears, aged between 14 and 22; and second group of 15 students with normal hearing with mean (SD) age of 14 (2) years. In addition to inter-views, we also conducted sentence-completion and grammaticality judgment tasks to explore their performance in each category.Results: The deaf group performed significantly worse than hearing group in all the tests. Our results also demonstrated a significant numerical gap between all five categories in the deaf group, beginning from the lowest least impaired category, which is in agreement, and ending up to the most impaired category, that is, complementizer.Conclusion: We found a dissociation of functional categories in deaf individuals. Also, higher nodes are more vulnerable to impairments than lower nodes.