Auditory processing in children and adolescents with cleft palate

Background Patients with cleft palate often suffer from recurrent otitis media chronica with effusion during infancy. The consecutive binaural conductive hearing loss is seen as a risk factor for developing auditory processing disease. Since there are just a few studies examining auditory processing in this population this study aimed to investigate on an own patient cohort with different cleft manifestations in terms of auditory processing disorders in context to given studies. Material and methods This study included 48 patients (516 years): all patients had a non-syndromic cleft palate and normal peripheral hearing at the time of examination. The protocol included otoscopy, pure tone audiogram, speech intelligibility in noise, dichotic speech discrimination, auditory short-term memory and a parental questionnaire. Results The majority of the parents did not indicate problems in the parental questionnaire. 69 % of the participants showed conspicuous results in the speech intelligibility in noise, whereas the dichotic speech discrimination and the auditory short-term memory were suspicious in 16.7 % only. The results in both tests proved mainly a problem in younger children. Noticeable results in speech intelligibility in noise were found in all age groups. Conclusion Children and adolescents with cleft palate are at risk to develop auditory processing disorders. In this study population speech intelligibility in noise was the most common problem. 90 % of the children had received a speech therapy which could have already compensated problems concerning dichotic speech discrimination and the auditory short-term memory but not problems in speech intelligibility in noise.