(PP1105) Assessing Word Recognition in Infants with a History of Chronic Otitis Media

The presence of chronic otitis media (COM) can cause a temporary mild hearing loss. Permanent mild hearing losses have been shown to impact word learning. Previous research using the head-turn preference paradigm has found that typically hearing eleven-month-olds recognize words independent of context, as measured by longer looking times to familiar words like “baby”, versus unfamiliar words like “taboo”. Results show that eleven-month-olds with a history of COM do not show a preference for familiar over unfamiliar words. Implications for the effects of COM on early language learning are discussed. 

 

Summary: 

Otitis media (OM) is a common disease diagnosed in children (National Institute of Health, 2000). OM impacts quality of life and can result in a fluctuating mild to moderate conductive hearing loss, which may interfere with language development due to altered auditory processing (Roberts, Rosenfield & Zeisel, 2004; Homøe et al., 2019). It is accepted that a mild hearing loss will impact language encoding, but there is still debate as to whether OM has a negative impact on a child’s speech, language, and academic performance long-term (Roberts, Rosenfield & Zeisel, 2004; Karunanayake et al., 2016; Roberts et al., 2004). There is no research on how children with chronic OM (COM), defined as three or more bouts, early in their lifetime develop language compared to children without a history of COM. 

The auditory head-turn preference paradigm (AHPP) uses an infant's looking time to stimuli to determine if an infant has developed a receptive lexicon; the word list that has a longer looking time is the preferred stimuli (Hallé & Boysson-Bardies, 1994). The AHPP involves familiar and unfamiliar word lists presented to an infant from a speaker positioned on either the right or left side in conjunction with light stimuli. Looking time is blindly coded by the experimenter. Infants with a receptive lexicon have a longer looking time to familiar words, which is documented to occur in eleven-month-old infants (Vihman et al., 2004; DePaolis et al., 2016). We hypothesize that infants with a history of COM will have no preference for familiar or unfamiliar words suggesting that infants with a history of COM are delayed in their ability to recognize words independent of context as compared to a cohort without a history of COM. 

Eleven-month-olds diagnosed with at least three bouts of OM and with no presence of bilateral OM on test date were included. The stimuli used were the same familiar and unfamiliar word lists used by Vihman et al. (2004) with the word “nappy” replaced with “cookie” and words recorded by a female American-English speaker. Each word list contained 12 words and the lists were presented in a pseudo-random order to ensure each child would hear every word at least once. Testing consisted of four familiarization trials and twelve test trials.

At the time of proposal, 13 infants were included in data analysis. A paired sample means two-tailed t-test did not show a significant group effect between word lists, t(12) = 0.728, p = .48. The results indicate that infants do not have a preference for familiar or unfamiliar words, suggesting a delay in developing word form recognition abilities compared to eleven-month-old peers without a history of COM. The temporary hearing loss caused by OM reduces the access to speech and language for an infant. The results of this study suggest monitoring the hearing thresholds of infants with COM closely to determine if a referral to speech-language pathology for early intervention services is necessary and including audiologists in a team-based interdisciplinary approach.