Key points
  1. The BCD is an important method of hearing intervention for patients with single-sided deafness (SSD) who do not meet the surgical indications.
  2. The BCD significantly improved the speech discrimination scores in quiet for the paediatric SSD population.
  3. The BCD significantly decreased (became better) the speech reception thresholds for children with SSD in the presence of speech-spectrum noise masking that was either co-located with or spatially separated from the target speech signals.
  4. For children with SSD, there was no statistical improvement in SRM after using a BCD for a short time.
  5. For NH children, SRM continued to change during childhood.
Introduction
Single-sided deafness (SSD), the most severe form of unilateral sensorineural hearing loss (USNHL), is defined as profound hearing loss in the affected ear and normal hearing in the contralateral ear [1]. As the healthy ear was considered adequate for perceiving basic speech in a quiet environment, the hearing problems are usually ignored in these patients. Nowadays, an increasing body of research has shown that due to the loss of binaural auditory input, patients with SSD might struggle with auditory deficits in sound localisation, speech perception and spatial release from masking (SRM) in noisy environments [2,3].
Current treatment options for children with SSD remain controversial. The three common ones are cochlear implants (CI), contralateral routing of signal (CROS), and bone conduction device (BCD) [4,5]. For patients who do not meet the indications for cochlear implantation, such as children with cochlear nerve deficiency (CND) or inner ear abnormalities, BCDs are useful alternatives [6,7]. To date, little is known about the characteristics of speech perception ability and SRM for paediatric SSD patients who receive a non-invasive BCD. This study aimed to primarily assess speech perception performance in a quiet environment and in the presence of speech-spectrum noise (SSN) masking that was either co-located with or spatially separated from the target speech signals.