Dichotic listening in adults with sensorineural hearing loss

Digits and consonant-vowel (CV) nonsense syllables were presented dichotically to 36 normal-hearing subjects and 36 subjects with bilaterally symmetrical sensorineural hearing loss. The normal-hearing subjects performed significantly better in the recall of both digits and CV nonsense syllables, and recall decreased significantly as the degree of hearing loss increased. The expected right ear advantage was observed for the normal-hearing subjects on both tests. As a group, the hearing-loss subjects showed no significant ear preference, and ear preference did not vary significantly with the degree of hearing loss. However, individual hearing-loss subjects showed marked ear asymmetry for the dichotic digits. For both dichotic tests, individual ear preference increased as the degree of hearing loss increased. Significant but low correlations were observed between better ear speech discrimination scores for the hearing-loss subjects and the preferred ear for dichotic CV nonsense syllables.