The effect of mild to moderate hearing impairment on Persian dichotic digit test in young children

Hearing impaired students experience binaural hearing like normal peers and school age is challenging time for using dichotic listening. Lack of research was found on relationship of Persian hearing impaired children with central auditory processing (CAP). One of the aims of this study was a comparison between Persian dichotic digit test (DDT) score in children with mild and moderate hearing loss (HL) and normal ones.
Forty one hearing impaired children (16 mild HL and 25 moderate HL) and 41subjects with normal hearing all between 7-12 years of age, in both genders (sex has no effect on this test), were selected and tested Persian DDT. Results from Right Ear/Left Ear scores, Right Ear Advantage (REA) and age effect were collected and compared with normal subjects.
Results of this study showed the average of 89.07% correct scores in right ear and 82.24% in left ear. The difference between both ears was 6.83%. Comparison of the right ear correct scores and left ear correct scores showed a significant REA (p0.05).
This study pointed out which Persian DDT is not affected by mild-to-moderate sensory neural hearing loss. However, younger children need more interval time between two items to respond to the tests.