Amblyaudia (amblyos- blunt; audia-hearing) is a term coined by Dr. Deborah Moncrieff to characterize a specific pattern of performance from dichotic listening tests.
Dichotic listening tests are widely used to assess individuals for binaural integration, a type of auditory processing skill.
These symptoms may lead to difficulty attending to auditory information causing many to speculate that language acquisition and academic achievement may be deleteriously affected in children with amblyaudia.
A child suffering from amblyaudia may have trouble in appropriate vocabulary comprehension and production and the use of past, present and future tenses.
Recurrent ear infections (otitis media) are the leading cause of temporary auditory deprivation in young children.
[14][15][16] During ear infection bouts, the quality of the signal that reaches the auditory regions of the brains of a subset of children with OM is degraded in both timing and magnitude.
It is a disorder related to brain organization and function rather than what is typically considered a “hearing loss” (damage to the cochlea).
The same children also produced weaker fMRI responses from their non-dominant left ears when processing dichotic material in the scanner.