A New Speech, Spatial, and Qualities of Hearing Scale Short-Form for Deaf Children

Deafness significantly affects several auditory tasks of everyday life in children: understanding speech in quiet and noisy environments, spatial location of sounds ... These difficulties in locating sound sources are often ignored by parents and underestimated by children. Nowadays we there is specific tools to evaluate these problems in children. Indeed, there is a validated French questionnaire (Speech and Spatial Questionnaire SSQ) for adults that evaluates auditory abilities, including sound localization, in different tasks of daily life. Although robust, this questionnaire includes 49 questions and is too long for daily use in consultation. For this reason, Moulin et al validated in 2018 a short version of the SSQ questionnaire for adults with only 15 items. Based on this model, the aim of this study is to develop and test a paediatric questionnaire with 12 items to assess more specifically auditory difficulties in deaf children. This questionnaire will follow the validated frame of the adult SSQ questionnaire and will consist of three subscales: speech hearing (4 items), spatial hearing (4 items), and qualities of hearing (4 items). These 3 subscales are identical to those defined in long and short form pf the adult SSQ questionnaire.