Participants: Dr. E. LePage, Dr. N. Murray

To make the relevance of NAL research clear not just to the scientific community but to a more general audience

Date of interview: 14^th November, 2000

The inquiry was set up by Dr. Brendan Nelson (Lib) to inquire into why boys' academic performance was significantly less than girls when it came to literacy and linguistic subjects. We were aware of the huge interest from educators and people interested in diverse reasons for the difference, in particular the emotional side of boys responses. There appeared to be nobody presenting the hearing issues, the gender differences of which had become very prominent in our otoacoustic emission data. Whereas hearing falls off in men faster than women, we showed that the trend is established as early as the first decade. We attended to suggest that the two phenomena may be connected, particularly since there has been such a marked change in boys educational outcomes in the last 20 years, and our data suggested that the hearing of boys has been deteriorating on average in the same period. A remarkable fact which emerge from considering averages is that if you slide the aging curves for men and women sideways (because the male curve lies below the female curve) you have to "age" boys ears by at least 15 years to get the curves to line up. We suggest this relative difference in "ear age" is mostly due to noise exposure, but there may be other biological factors as well.

The other aspect is that the key aspect of the linguistic development has to do with fluency and again we have a physiological parallel, suggesting that our differences may not just be statistically significant but have functional significance. Otoacoustic emissions actually provide a direct measure of the speed of processing of the ear which we have shown is significantly less in males. Some of the feedback we've received since has led to a discussion about central auditory processing and attention deficits. We've been able to respond that our work does not detract from these matters, but simply points out that the reason may not be all central; an important component appears to lie at the periphery, but it needed OAEs to show it.

The Hansard for our presentation is at http://www.aph.gov.au/hansard/reps/commttee/r4381.pdf

Our evidence starts at p.415 (i.e. EEWR415 to EEWR427). We have submitted some requested typographical corrections to the Hansard editors which have not yet been incorporated.

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