Help-seeking behaviour of parents of children with hearing loss in India: a qualitative analysis.

Objective: The age of identification of hearing loss in children is highly influenced by the hearing help seeking behaviour of their parents, particularly in countries without universal newborn hearing screening programs. In this study, an attempt was made to identify the factors associated with help seeking behaviour in parents of children with hearing loss, and the relationship of such factors with the age of identification of hearing loss.

Design: Focus group discussions based on the framework of health belief model were carried out.

Influence of Alignment Strategies and Consonant Acoustic Features on Laterality Index in Dichotic Testing in Indian Languages.

Background: The right ear advantage (REA) observed for dichotic CV (DCV) testing in Indian languages is seen to be smaller compared with the observations in several studies in English and other languages.

Purpose: The present study aims to explore whether the differences in the temporal alignment of consonant-vowel (CV) stimuli used for the dichotic task is a contributing factor that can explain the smaller REAs observed in Indian languages.

Research Design: The study compared the laterality index (LI) values between DCV test results obtained using CV stimuli that were temporally aligned at the acoustic onset versus the burst onset, with 0 milliseconds lag between the right and left ears.