Congenital unilateral hearing loss involves multi-modal neuropsychological processing.

Children with congenital unilateral hearing loss (CUHL), although they can hear and learn through the normal hearing side, cannot benefit from binaural advantages and may encounter difficulties in accessing relevant acoustic information in adverse listening environments. Literature has shown that children with CUHL also experience greater difficulties than their normal hearing peers in a variety of domains. Nevertheless, individual performance is highly variable, with some children showing developmental delay and other seemingly demonstrating normal performance and development. Similarly, while recent neuroimaging research information shows effects of CUHL on auditory but also non-auditory brain regions, little is known about specific consequences on clinical neuropsychological domains. In order to highlight if CUHL affects cognitive disabilities that go beyond auditory system, particularly those connected with Executive Attention, we evaluated 15 children affected by CUHL (age 8-11yrs) with average scores on general cognitive abilities compared to control group (15 children). The assessment battery included tests examining several abilities (Executive attention, visuo-spatial short term memory, visual and motor search, complex visual constructive skills, word and non-word reading), following the rationale that Executive Attention is the basis of several complex abilities. The clinical sample shows significant differences with the control group. We found impairments that go beyond auditory problems and our results support the information derived from functional neuroimaging studies, showing effects of CUHL on auditory but also on non-auditory brain regions and suggesting that CUHL can represent the source of a functional connectivity alteration. Even though CUHL represents a modality specific deficit, it may well involve complex neuropsychological development and multi-modal processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]