Characterizing Sleep Outcomes in School-Age Children with Hearing Loss is a two-year grant, awarded December of 2025, funded by the American Speech-Language-Hearing (ASH) Foundation. This project investigates objective and subjective measures of sleep and fatigue in children with hearing loss who use hearing aids. The research is led by Julia Drouin, AuD, PhD, Director of the Auditory Language Learning (ALLears) Lab at UNC School of Medicine.
As a clinical audiologist, Drouin’s interest in sleep research began in a different context. Her early work examined how memory consolidation via sleep can be leveraged to stabilize and strengthen newly learned speech patterns. She studied how listeners adapt to acoustically degraded speech signals — similar to the speech signal heard through hearing aids or cochlear implants. Drouin found that individuals who completed speech training immediately before sleep showed stronger retention than those who trained earlier in the day. These findings sparked her interest in applying sleep research to better understand how sleep influences speech and language outcomes in children with hearing loss.
When she began designing studies on sleep-mediated speech learning in children with hearing loss, Drouin realized a critical gap in the literature. While there is substantial evidence that children with hearing loss experience increased fatigue, surprisingly little is known about how these children sleep. Before investigating how sleep might support speech and language learning, it became clear that there was a foundational need to explore sleep patterns in kids with hearing loss. Addressing that gap ultimately became the focus of the current grant-funded study. The project aims to systematically characterize sleep in children with hearing loss. Many of these children expend significant cognitive energy to process acoustic speech signals throughout the day, which can contribute to increased listening-related fatigue. Because sleep and fatigue are closely intertwined, understanding sleep patterns in this population is a necessary step towards improving overall health outcomes.
The study engages student researchers and includes close partnerships with UNC Pediatric Audiology, including collaboration with pediatric audiology experts Caitlin Sapp, AuD, PhD, and Kristen Ponturiero, AuD, CCC-A. The study focuses on children ages 6 to 12 years, which is a developmental period marked by increasing academic and social listening demands. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, children in this age range should sleep 9-12 hours each day. This guideline serves as a benchmark, as preliminary findings suggest that children with hearing loss may fall short of the recommended minimum amount of sleep.
Currently, the study includes 30 children with plans to expand recruitment substantially over the course of the grant. Using a multifaceted approach, the research team is collecting data through actigraphy-based sleep monitoring, caregiver questionnaires, child self-reports, and sleep diaries. Actigraphy devices, similar to consumer wearable fitness trackers, are worn at home for 7 days and provide a snapshot of both sleep duration and sleep quality. Combining objective and subjective measures allows the team to develop a more complete understanding of sleep health in this population.
Following the completion of the project, Drouin hopes the findings will lay the foundation for larger-scale investigations. If meaningful differences in sleep are identified, future research could examine more detailed aspects of sleep architecture and explore how hearing-related factors influence sleep and language outcomes.