ABSTRACT
OBJECTIVE: The age of identification of hearing loss in children is highly influenced by the hearing help seeking behaviour of their parents, particularly in countries without universal newborn hearing screening programs. In this study, an attempt was made to identify the factors associated with help seeking behaviour in parents of children with hearing loss, and the relationship of such factors with the age of identification of hearing loss. DESIGN: Focus group discussions based on the framework of health belief model were carried out. The discussions were transcribed and the transcripts were thematically analysed. STUDY SAMPLE: Participants were 35 parents of children with hearing loss from the state of Karnataka in India. RESULTS: The findings revealed 30 factors related to their awareness about hearing loss, geographical location, socio-economic status, family, and society. The factors differed between early and late help seekers. CONCLUSIONS: Awareness, accessibility, and affordability are the key factors that influenced the hearing help seeking behaviour of the participants. Effective public awareness programs, newborn hearing screening programs, and provisions to make hearing healthcare affordable to all can reduce the age of identification of paediatric hearing loss in India.
ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: The right ear advantage (REA) observed for dichotic CV (DCV) testing in Indian languages is seen to be smaller compared with the observations in several studies in English and other languages. PURPOSE: The present study aims to explore whether the differences in the temporal alignment of consonant-vowel (CV) stimuli used for the dichotic task is a contributing factor that can explain the smaller REAs observed in Indian languages. RESEARCH DESIGN: The study compared the laterality index (LI) values between DCV test results obtained using CV stimuli that were temporally aligned at the acoustic onset versus the burst onset, with 0 milliseconds lag between the right and left ears. STUDY SAMPLE: A total of 50 right-handed individuals (native speakers of Kannada language) in the age range of 17 to 30 years with normal hearing sensitivity participated in the study. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS: The participants' responses to the two sets of DCV stimuli were recorded and compared. LI was calculated for the overall scores as well as for specific voiced and unvoiced segment combinations. To test the reliability of the findings, 10 of the participants were re-tested using the same stimuli and the data were checked for reliability. RESULTS: The overall LI was 15.1% for the stimuli temporally aligned at the burst onset, whereas it was 5.7% for the stimuli temporally aligned at the acoustic onset. The difference in LI was not significant between the alignment conditions for unvoiced-unvoiced and voiced-voiced CV combinations, but this difference was significant for the unvoiced-voiced and voiced-unvoiced CV combinations. Comparing test and re-test scores showed good reliability. CONCLUSION: The results support our hypothesis that smaller REA observed in DCV task in Indian languages was due to the temporal alignment of CV stimuli. In the acoustic-onset-aligned condition, presenting pairs contrasting in the voicing feature tends to cancel out a relative ear advantage.
