Prof Dani Tomlin, the head of audiology and speech pathology at the University of Melbourne, says people who use noise-cancelling headphones for prolonged periods may find listening harder when they take them off.
Dr Cheryl Edwards, an audiologist at Boston children’s hospital, said children with APD could struggle to hear in classrooms, have difficulty working out where sounds are coming from, and miss nonverbal cues such as the shift in tone that flags sarcasm.
Excessive use of noise-cancelling headphones could impair the developmental process by which children learn to attend to sounds, Almeida says.
The condition, known as auditory processing disorder (APD), is often diagnosed in children, so the rise in adults with similar issues struck Almeida as odd.
“If so, noise cancelling could be a good feature, in that it allows one to listen to music, without interference from background noise, at a lower level.”.
