الفهرس 
INTRODUCTIONOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Hearing loss is the most common developmental disorder identifiable at birth and its prevalence increases throughout school age due to the additions of late onset, late identified and acquired hearing loss.
There is increasing evidence in literature that deprivation of sound stimulation can negatively influences the central structures of the auditory system. In some studies, these influences appeared to be greater if deprivation had taken place during an early critical period. Studies show significant impairment of speech, language, and cognitive development in children with hearing disabilities which correlates to the degree and time of detection of HL.
This study included 20 children with mild sensory hearing loss, 20 children with moderate sensory hearing loss and 10 children with normal hearing as controls. All children of the study were subjected to otoscopic examination, measuring of peripheral hearing threshold, middle ear functions and questionnaires for CAPD, ADHD and dyslexia and screening on selected central auditory function tests to reveal auditory processing capabilities;(SPIN RT, SPIN LT, DDT, PPST) then the full version of these four tests in addition to more five tests (MLD, AFT-R, BFT, CST, LPF).
In order to evaluate the performance of studied groups on the screening central auditory tests, the 10th percentile was arbitrary chosen. A composite score was constructed for performance on all screening central tests. A score from 1-4 designates the number of tests for which the performance score was in the vicinity of the 10th percentile.
The aim of this study was to evaluate the performance of children with mild and moderate sensory hearing loss on central auditory tests to identify whether peripheral hearing loss influences timing and spectral signal processing in the brain auditory pathway.
The protocol of the study included: history taking, audiological assessment consisting of pure tone audiometry to assess peripheral hearing, a selected test battery forauditory processing evaluation which included the full version of the screening tests (SPIN RT, SPIN LT, PPST, DDT) in addition to AFT-R, binaural MLD,CST,LPF speech test,binaural fusion test and assessment of reading.
The performance of the children with mild sensory hearing loss included in composite score 1-3 with the composite 1 having the highest number of children (composite score 1=16 children, composite score 2=1 child, and composite score 3=3 children).
The performance of the children with moderate sensory hearing loss included also in composite score 1-3with composite score 1 having the highest number of children (composite score 1=12 children, composite score 2=5 children and composite score 3=3 children).
The result showed that all hearing loss children failed the PPST on screening version but the group with mild HL passed the full version while the moderate HL children not, all of them passed the DDT on screening version except one child with mild HL but all of them passed the full version, on screening SPIN RT and LT some of them passed and some failed but on the full version the mild HL children were close to normal while those with moderate HL are below normal .Their results were within the normal range on on MLD and AFT-R, but their results are below the norms on BFT, CST and LPF.