“…Early detection and treatment of children with hearing loss lead to great improvements in health-related quality of life [76], and very effectively mitigate the negative impact of hearing loss on the child's speech, language, educational achievement, and vocational outcomes [5,8,10,55,65,77]. Children who are identified as having hearing loss by the time they reach the age of 6 months and receive appropriate intervention have significantly better language scores than those who are identified at a later age, irrespective of sex, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, associated disabilities and severity of the hearing loss [41,40,78]. Furthermore, these earlyidentified children go on to have average language scores that fall within the normal range by the time they reach the ages of 1 to 5 years, matching the scores of their peers who have no hearing loss [5,13,41,44,56,[78][79][80][81][82].…”