A child with a moderately severe hearing loss may have defective speech. Why?

Good hearing is essential to the social and intellectual development of infants and young children. Hearing loss can affect learning, speech, attention and emotional development. It also affects reading, writing and academic performance. These deficits can occur as early as kindergarten and first grade. Most children with hearing loss begin to show significant learning difficulties by the third grade due to the increasing complexity of language, social interaction, and verbal communications. Some of these problems can even affect children with minimal hearing loss. Children with minimal hearing loss experience problems hearing faint or distant speech and can miss classroom instruction and subtle conversational cues that could cause a child to react inappropriately. They have difficulty following fast-paced verbal exchanges and hearing the fine word-sound distinctions such as plurality, tense, possessives, etc. In addition, a child with a minimal hearing loss may appear immature and tire more easily than normal-hearing children because of the extra effort needed to hear.