THURSDAY, June 6, 2002 (HealthDayNews) -- A new hearing test that simulates the noise of the real world may help improve knowledge about kids' hearing and potential developmental and learning disabilities.
Until now, no hearing test effectively evaluated how well children can tune in some sounds and tune out others. That's because most hearing tests are done in quiet rooms.
But the new hearing test, which was developed by University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher Ruth Litovsky, includes a variety of competing noises that children might hear at school, on the playground, or at home.
In the test, children sit at a computer surrounded by a semicircle of loudspeakers and listen for words that match pictures on the screen. Sometimes, it might be only one voice asking them to point to an object.
Other times, there will be many different voices coming from one or many speakers, with only one voice asking the child to choose an object on the computer screen.
Children find the tasks more difficult when voices come from the same place and more competing voices are added, Litovsky says. Each child's ability to separate the different speakers varies, most likely because of individual rates of auditory and cognitive development, she adds.
She notes that adults are much better at such tasks because many aspects of hearing continue to develop into the teen years. And because humans have binaural hearing -- the ability to hear with both ears -- an impairment affecting that could limit a child's ability to pick out important sounds in noisy environments, which in turn could affect learning, speaking and concentration, she adds.
Litovsky, who is a communicative disorders professor, presented her findings today at the annual Acoustical Society of American conference in Pittsburgh. Pilot versions of her hearing test have been distributed to clinics in Milwaukee, New York City, Boston, and London, according to the university.
More information
The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders has a neat game for kids to learn about things that can affect their hearing.
