Accurate acoustic evaluation is necessary in order to start early rehabilitation of hearing-impaired children. It is difficult for these children to obtain an auditory behavior response owing to immaturity of the auditory pathway and undeveloped perception. We report the present circumstances and problems of acoustic evaluation of hearing-impaired children.
Seven children, who had been diagnosed as having bilateral deafness by the auditory brain stem response (ABR) and hearing aids (HA), were evaluated in this study.
Changes in auditory behavior were observed in six cases after starting to use an HA. In another case of a multiply handicapped child, we observed different auditory behavior after this child was able to use an HA regularly.
The acoustic evaluation was performed by ABR, behavioral observation audiometry (BOA), conditional oriented reaction (COR) audiometry and from information about daily auditory behavior from the patients' families.
Immediate behavioral changes were observed in the former 6 cases, but there were many individual differences between the cases.
In the multiply handicapped case, hearing perception and ability to detect phonic sensation were developed by using an HA, and therefore, the COR of this patient revealed a decreased threshold level.
