Recurrent or persistent otitis media with effusion for at least 3 months. Abnormal or inadequate auditory sensory input during the critical child development periods have important medical implication. They should be recognized as disease vectors, the same as a virus, bacterium, or an aberrant gene. All hearing losses in children, including mild and moderate, should receive remedial intervention as early as possible. This article stresses that even the mildest of hearing loss can negatively affect academic performance.
Research reveals that approximately one out of every five children have some degree of hearing loss.
However, for speech to be intelligible, the person must be able to discriminate the word sound distinctions of individual phonemes. Consequently, speech might be very audible, but not consistently intelligible to a child with a minimal hearing loss, causing the child to hear, for example, words such as walked, walking, walks all as ah. Noisy classroom environments further complicate the situation and degrade listening skills and affect auditory comprehension. Hearing loss of any degree can interfere with the development of a child's spoken language, reading and writing skills, and academic performance. That is, hearing loss can be described as an invisible acoustic filter that distorts, smears, or eliminates incoming sounds, especially sounds from a distance.