All That Noise Is Damaging Children’s Hearing

Michael became hooked on headphones in his early teens. He walked the streets of Brooklyn day after day with his favorite music blasting directly into his ears. By his early 20s, the sensory hair cells in his inner ears had been permanently damaged and Michael had lost much of his upper-range hearing.

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Aude Van Ryn

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Health Guide: Hearing Loss »The Children’s Hearing Institute reports that hearing loss among children and young adults is rising in the United States, and that one-third of the damage is caused by noise.

According to the American Academy of Audiology, about one child in eight has noise-induced hearing loss. That means some five million children have an entirely preventable disability that will stay with them for life.

The academy has begun a “turn it to the left” (the volume dial, that is) awareness campaign in hopes of protecting current and future generations of youngsters from unwittingly damaging their hearing. Often, the problem is not detected until children develop persistent ringing in the ears or begin to have learning or behavior problems in school because of trouble understanding speech.

Although newborns are now routinely screened for hearing loss, there is no federal mandate for screening the hearing of school-age children. What testing is done often fails to check hearing at high enough pitches, a federal research team pointed out in the journal Pediatrics.

Surrounded by Noise

We live in a noisy world. Young and old alike are beset by sounds over which we may have little or no control: power mowers, leaf blowers, snow blowers, car and house alarms, sirens, motorcycles, Jet Skis, loudspeakers, even movie previews.

We attend rock concerts, weddings, parties and sports events at which the music is so loud you can hardly hear the person sitting next to you. At home, televisions, stereos and computer games are often turned up so loud that listeners cannot hear a doorbell or a telephone.

Many “modern” restaurants have opted for noise enhancement instead of abatement. And try having a conversation in a school cafeteria at lunchtime.

Any time you need to shout to be heard by someone near you, your hearing is most likely to be in a decibel danger zone.

As if environmental noise were not enough, now we besiege children with noisy toys and personal listening devices that can permanently damage their hearing. Toys that meet the safety standards of the American Society for Testing and Materials can produce sound up to 138 decibels, as loud as a jet taking off. Yet workplace rules require hearing protection for those exposed to noise above 85 decibels.

A series of studies conducted in 2002 among 116 infants by researchers at Johns Hopkins indicated that even moderate background noise can interfere with how they learn language. The effect on babies’ hearing in a noisy house is similar to what an older person with age-related hearing loss may encounter at a crowded cocktail party.

A landmark study in 1975 found that children in classrooms on the noisy side of a school had lower reading scores than those whose classes were on the quiet side.

Noise-induced hearing loss can come about in two ways: from a brief exposure to a very loud noise or from consistent exposure to moderate-level noise. Thus, there is much concern about the lasting effects of MP3 players that are turned up loud enough to block out surrounding sound, like street noise. An MP3 player at maximum volume produces about 105 decibels — 100 times as intense as 85 decibels, where hearing damage begins. (For every 10 decibels, sound intensity increases tenfold.)

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health says 110 decibels can produce hearing damage after just 1 minute, 29 seconds of exposure. The League for the Hard of Hearing cautions that “noise levels above 85 decibels will harm hearing over time” and that levels above 140 decibels — the pain threshold — can damage hearing after just one exposure.

New bone-conduction headphones that hook over the ears and pass sound through the skull to the inner ear may not solve the problem. While they allow listeners to hear an oncoming car or a person speaking, users may turn up the volume to overcome ambient noise, damaging the 15,000 tiny hair cells in the inner ear that transfer sound energy to the brain.

Once damaged, hair cells can neither be repaired nor replaced. The damage makes it difficult to hear high-pitched sounds, including certain speech sounds and the voices of women and children. Tinnitus, a continuous ringing, roaring or clicking in the ears, can also result.

Protecting Young Ears

from The New York Times

When it’s more than the ‘terrible twos’

We all know how infants can act up during their terrible twos, but when these behaviors are accompanied by developmental setbacks, they could point to something more serious.

Researchers are currently learning more about regressive autistic spectrum disorder (RASD), which describes children who have been diagnosed with autism who demonstrate a history of a regression. The regression refers to a marked loss of previously acquired developmental skills such as language or social ability.

“Often children with regression aren’t being seen by professionals at the time of the loss of skills. The parents are aware of a problem, but not sure what it is so they don’t seek medical or psychological help until the symptoms persist for over a year,” said Gerry A. Stefanatos, D.Phil., an associate professor in the department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Temple University.

Stefanatos writes about RASD and the growing research into this disorder in the December issue of Neuropsychology Review. He estimates RASD comprises about 25 to 30 percent of the population of children eventually diagnosed with an autistic disorder.

Children with RASD seem to develop normally until about 18-24 months. At that point they have acquired small vocabulary and act social, but then over the course of weeks or months, they lose their speech and no longer use words they had previously learned. They have problems comprehending speech they used to understand and no longer follow commands.

“One of the more obvious cues for parents is if the child no longer responds to his or her own name. Often times this is accompanied by deterioration in behavior. They child can become irritable, prone to tantrums,” Stefanatos said.

Information about regression is commonly obtained retrospectively many months to years after the symptoms began. Due to the unclear onset time and prolonged time course that characterizes the regression in many cases, it’s difficult for parents to remember when their child was no longer using words previously elicited frequently with meaning at an earlier stage of development.

“If you have suspicions, go and see a pediatrician and explain what you’re seeing in your child. If there is in fact a regression, it helps to have another set of eyes to confirm suspicions. You may also want to seek out a specialist in autism to assist with diagnoses,” Stefanatos said. “When continuously living with a child, it’s often difficult to see the subtle changes over time.”

When Stefanatos works with parents, he frequently asks them to provide video of the child at various points in development (birthdays, holidays) to determine the history of the potential disorder. The videos can show the child engaged with people and yet a year later, show that same child with serious withdrawal.

Among the many potential causes of regression, Stefanatos said health care providers or autism specialists who suspect RASD should look for evidence of an electroencephalographic (EEG) abnormality, which might suggest an epileptic or seizure disorder. An EEG measures electrical activity produced by the brain and is recorded from electrodes placed on the scalp.

Seizure-related brain activity can act like “electrical noise” and interfere with the function of areas of the brain responsible for different areas of development. This noise can potentially be disruptive to the wiring of connections between brain cells developing at that stage. In these cases, medications may reduce disruptive electrical discharges so they don’t have a negative influence on neurological development.

“When it’s treated, either behaviorally or medically, there can be a significant improvement in behavior and development. This is one reason why it’s important to identify RASD as early as possible,” he said.

More research is required to explore the similarities and differences between RASD and ASD. In the meantime, it’s important for parents and health care providers to pay attention to any lost developmental milestones.

“Be very attentive to that aspect of child’s history and act accordingly; take it very seriously. It (regression) can be a red light that something is amiss with a child’s development and the issue needs to be looked at in more detail,” Stefanatos said.

from EurekAlert.org

Speech Therapy News

Tue Oct 20, 2009
TheNational

Test all newborns’ hearing, say doctors

ABU DHABI // All newborns should be given a five-minute test to detect hearing loss, which can severely impair their development and eventually lead to emotional, psychological and social problems, doctors say.

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Related Topix: Audiology, Medicine

Mon Oct 19, 2009
The Hindu

‘Down’s Syndrome’ week to be observed

PUDUCHERRY: Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan , Puducherry in association with Satya Special School is observing ‘Down’s Syndrome’ week from October 21 to 24 for parents and special educators at the conference hall of SSA at the Department of Education.

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Wed Oct 14, 2009
FOX30Online

Lack of speech development

Hearing loss does not affect a person’s intellectual capacity or ability to learn.

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Related Topix: Audiology

Sat Oct 10, 2009
Examiner.com

Contact school district beginning at age 2 if you suspect autism

Contact your school beginning at age 2. One thing many parents of very young children do not know is that if you suspect your child may have autism, your local school district may be a great resource for support and services, even if your child is not of the age for kindergarten yet.

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Tue Oct 06, 2009
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Fenland children let down by speech therapy provisions

FAMILIES from across Fenland claim their children have been let down by the lack of speech therapy provision.

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Sat Oct 03, 2009
BellaOnline

Amendment IEP for Therapy

At the end of May the annual Individual Education Plan meeting was held for my nonverbal son Matthew.

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from Topix.net

Neurocognitive functions in euthymic bipolar patients

Objective: Meta-analytic findings support the hypothesis of specific neurocognitive deficits for bipolar patients in the domains of attention, processing speed, memory and executive functions. This study aims to show neurocognitive impairment in euthymic patients with bipolar I disorder compared with healthy controls while detailing the impact of medication side-effects or illness characteristics on neuropsychological test performance.

Method: Forty euthymic patients with bipolar I disorder were compared with 40 healthy controls in a cross-sectional design. Clinical features and neuropsychological measures of IQ, psychomotor speed, verbal fluency, learning and memory, executive functions and attention were assessed.

Results: Patients without antipsychotic drug use did not differ significantly from healthy controls in any neuropsychological measure. Yet patients treated with antipsychotics showed significant underperformance in the domains of semantic fluency, verbal learning and recognition memory as well as executive functions related to planning abilities, even when clinical features were controlled for.

Conclusion: The impact of antipsychotic medication needs to be further clarified for euthymic bipolar patients and should be considered when neuropsychological test performance is interpreted.

from Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica

Hazards: Scanners Can Damage Hearing Implants

The machines in question are known as 3T scanners and are much more powerful than early versions. The problem is they can demagnetize an important component of the implants. The study, led by Dr. Omid Majdani of Vanderbilt University, appears in the December issue of Otolaryngology — Head and Neck Surgery.

Unlike other hearing aids, which can be easily removed, cochlear implants are put in surgically. They are used by more than 100,000 people, and as 3T scans become more common, the issue is likely to become more important, the researcher said.

Magnets are used in the implants to allow them to be connected through the skin to a processor. They are also used in magnetic resonance imaging, as the name implies.

For the study, researchers placed a variety of implant magnets in an M.R.I. in different positions and for different lengths of time. They found that demagnetization was common at some angles. To their surprise, they also found that they were unable to fully remagnetize them by changing their position in the scanner.

from The New York Times

Altered language processing in autosomal dominant partial epilepsy with auditory features

Background: Autosomal dominant partial epilepsy with auditory features (ADPEAF) is an idiopathic focal epilepsy syndrome with auditory symptoms or receptive aphasia as major ictal manifestations, frequently associated with mutations in the leucine-rich, glioma inactivated 1 (LGI1) gene. Although affected subjects do not have structural abnormalities detected on routine MRI, a lateral temporal malformation was identified through high resolution MRI in one family. We attempted to replicate this finding and to assess auditory and language processing in ADPEAF using fMRI and magnetoencephalography (MEG).

Methods: We studied 17 subjects (10 affected mutation carriers, 3 unaffected carriers, 4 noncarriers) in 7 ADPEAF families, each of which had a different LGI1 mutation. Subjects underwent high-resolution structural MRI, fMRI with an auditory description decision task (ADDT) and a tone discrimination task, and MEG. A control group comprising 26 volunteers was also included.

Results: We found no evidence of structural abnormalities in any of the 17 subjects. On fMRI with ADDT, subjects with epilepsy had significantly less activation than controls. On MEG with auditory stimuli, peak 2 auditory evoked field latency was significantly delayed in affected individuals compared to controls.

Conclusions: These findings do not support the previous report of a lateral temporal malformation in autosomal dominant partial epilepsy with auditory features (ADPEAF). However, our fMRI and magnetoencephalography data suggest that individuals with ADPEAF have functional impairment in language processing.

from Neurology

Linguistic variation in the discourse of outsourced call centers

This study explores linguistic variation in outsourced call centers involving Filipino call-takers and American callers engaged in various types of customer service transactions. The specific goals of this study are: 1) to establish the statistical co-occurrence of linguistic features in outsourced call center discourse; and 2) to examine how the speakers use these features and patterns of speech based on role (as agent or caller), gender, and the types of service transactions (or `accounts’). The data for analysis come from a corpus of call center texts collected in the Philippines (N of texts = 364, approximately 453,630 words). The research design follows a quantitative multi-dimensional framework developed by Biber (1988) for the extraction and interpretation of linguistic co-occurrence in the corpus. Three linguistic dimensions are extracted and interpreted microanalytically: 1) Addressee-Focused, Polite, and Elaborated Information vs Involved and Simplified Narrative; 2) Planned, Procedural Talk; and 3) Managed Information Flow. Results show that the discourse of agents and callers are different in linguistic and textual composition across these extracted dimensions. Similarly, accounts and participants’ gender are both found to affect linguistic choices in the transactions.

from Discourse Studies

Grammaticality judgments in autism: Deviance or delay

Language in autism has been the subject of intense interest, because communication deficits are central to the disorder, and because autism serves as an arena for testing theories of language acquisition. High-functioning older children with autism are often considered to have intact grammatical abilities, despite pragmatic impairments. Given the heterogeneity in language skills at younger ages, this assumption merits further investigation. Participants with autism (n=21, aged nine to seventeen years), matched on chronological age, receptive vocabulary and IQ, to 22 typically developing individuals, completed a grammaticality judgment task. Participants with autism were significantly less sensitive than controls, specifically for third person singular and present progressive marking. Performance interacted with sentence length, with lower sensitivity to errors occurring at the end of the longest stimulus sentences. Performance sensitivity was associated with onset of single word and phrase speech, and with severity of autistic symptomatology. Implications of findings are discussed.

from the Journal of Child Language

How to measure development in corpora? An association strength approach

In this paper we propose a method for characterizing development in large longitudinal corpora. The method has the following three features: (i) it suggests how to represent development without assuming predefined stages; (ii) it includes caregiver speech/child-directed speech; (iii) it uses statistical association measures for investigating co-occurrence data. We exemplify the implementation of these proposals with data on the acquisition of the patterning of tense and grammatical aspect of four Russian children. The method, however, is suitable for a wide range of other acquisition questions as well.

from the Journal of Child Language

Knowing more than one can say: The early regular plural

This paper reports on partial knowledge in two-year-old children’s learning of the regular English plural. In Experiments 1 and 2, children were presented with one kind and its label and then were either presented with two of that same kind (A→AA) or the initial picture next to a very different thing (A→AB). The children in A→AA rarely produced the plural. The children in A→AB supplied the singular form of A but children in A→AA did not. Experiment 3 compared the performance of English-speaking and Japanese-speaking children in A→AA with common and novel nouns. The Japanese-speaking children (learning a language without a mandatory plural) supplied the singular form of A but the English-speaking children did not. The findings indicate young children learning English know there is a plural to be learned before they have fully worked out the rules of production or acquired the necessary singular–plural pairs for broad generalization.

from the Journal of Child Language

Maternal mental state talk and infants’ early gestural communication

Twenty-four infants were tested monthly for the production of imperative and declarative gestures between 0 ; 9 and 1 ; 3 and concurrent mother–infant free-play sessions were conducted at 0 ; 9, 1 ; 0 and 1 ; 3 (Carpenter, Nagell & Tomasello, 1998). Free-play transcripts were subsequently coded for maternal talk about mental states. Results revealed that the earlier infants produced imperative gestures, the more frequently their mothers made reference to the infants’ own volitional states (want, try, need, etc.) at 1 ; 3. The same relation also emerged using maternal reports of their infants’ gestural communication on a standard language development measure. These results indicate that mothers’ talk about desires and intentions is linked to their infants’ early developing communicative competence.

from the Journal of Child Language

Twelve-month-olds learn novel word–object pairings differing only in stress pattern

Infants at 1 ; 2 demonstrate difficulty in accessing subtle phonetic information about newly learned word–object pairings (Stager & Werker, 1997). In this study, we examined whether or not infants can access subtle prosodic information such as lexical stress in a word learning task. We tested infants younger than 1 ; 2 to see if they could learn two new word–object associations that differ only in stress pattern (Sww versus wSw). Our results are the first to demonstrate that, even without contextual support, infants at 1 ; 0 succeed at this task, suggesting that the salient acoustic properties associated with lexical stress facilitate word–object associative learning.

from the Journal of Child Language

Frontal brain activation in young children during picture book reading with their mothers

Conclusion: There was greater frontal lobe activation in children when they were engaged in a picture book reading task with their mothers, as opposed to passive viewing of a videotape in which the story was read to them. Social and verbal engagement of the mother in reading picture books with her young child may mediate frontal brain activity in the child.

from Acta Paediatrica

Anatomical and Physiological Considerations in Vestibular Dysfunction and Compensation

Sensory information from the vestibular, visual, and somatosensory/proprioceptive systems are integrated in the brain in complex ways to produce a final motor output to muscle groups for maintaining gaze, head and body posture, and controlling static and dynamic balance. The balance system is complex, which can make differential diagnosis of dizziness quite challenging. However, this complex system is organized anatomically in a variety of pathways, and some of these pathways have been documented. The vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) is one such pathway. Understanding the anatomy and physiology of the VOR facilitates our understanding of normal and abnormal eye movements, and research is advancing our understanding of the plasticity of the vestibular system. This review highlights anatomical and physiological features of the normal vestibular system, applies these concepts to explain some clinical findings in some common peripheral vestibular disorders, and discusses some of the research investigating the anatomical and physiological basis for vestibular compensation.

from Seminars in Hearing

Current Role of the Videonystagmography Examination in the Context of the Multidimensional Balance Function Test Battery

Assessment of the vestibular system once consisted of electronystagmography (ENG), and now more recently, videonystagmography (VNG). Over the last few decades this standard assessment has been expanded into a balance function assessment. The area of balance assessment now incorporates many different fields of study and possesses a strong research base. This multidisciplinary collaboration has resulted in newer tests such as vestibular-evoked myogenic potential (VEMP) and off-axis rotation. However, despite its age, the ENG/VNG examination still remains the bedrock test of the balance function test battery. This article describes the role of the ENG/VNG examination in the contemporary assessment of vertigo, dizziness, and imbalance.

from Seminars in Hearing