Families report the presence of amblyaudia in several individuals, suggesting that it may be genetic in nature. It is possible that abnormal auditory input during the first two years of life may increase a child’s risk for amblyaudia, although the precise relationship between deprivation timing and development of amblyaudia is still unclear. Recurrent ear infections (otitis media) are the leading cause of temporary auditory deprivation in young children. During ear infection bouts, the quality of the signal that reaches the auditory regions of the brains of a subset of children with OM is degraded in both timing and magnitude. When this degradation is asymmetric (worse in one ear than the other) the binaural cues associated with sound localization can also be degraded. Aural atresia (a closed external auditory canal) also causes temporary auditory deprivation in young children. Hearing can be restored to children with ear infections and aural atresia through surgical intervention (although ear infections will also resolve spontaneously). Nevertheless, children with histories of auditory deprivation secondary to these diseases can experience amblyaudia for years after their hearing has been restored.

Amblyaudia (amblyos- blunt; audia-hearing) is a term coined by Dr. Deborah Moncrieff from the University of Pittsburgh to characterize a specific pattern of performance from dichotic listening tests. Dichotic listening tests are widely used to assess individuals for binaural integration, a type of auditory processing skill. During the tests, individuals are asked to identify different words presented simultaneously to the two ears. Normal listeners can identify the words fairly well and show a small difference between the two ears with one ear slightly dominant over the other. For the majority of listeners, this small difference is referred to as a "right-ear advantage" because their right ear performs slightly better than their left ear. But some normal individuals produce a "left-ear advantage" during dichotic tests and others perform at equal levels in the two ears. Amblyaudia is diagnosed when the scores from the two ears are significantly different with the individual's dominant ear score much higher than the score in the non-dominant ear

Researchers interested in understanding the neurophysiological underpinnings of amblyaudia consider it to be a brain based hearing disorder that may be inherited or that may result from auditory deprivation during critical periods of brain development. Individuals with amblyaudia have normal hearing sensitivity (in other words they hear soft sounds) but have difficulty hearing in noisy environments like restaurants or classrooms. Even in quiet environments, individuals with amblyaudia may fail to understand what they are hearing, especially if the information is new or complicated. Amblyaudia can be conceptualized as the auditory analog of the better known central visual disorder amblyopia. The term “lazy ear” has been used to describe amblyaudia although it is currently not known whether it stems from deficits in the auditory periphery (middle ear or cochlea) or from other parts of the auditory system in the brain, or both. A characteristic of amblyaudia is suppression of activity in the non-dominant auditory pathway by activity in the dominant pathway which may be genetically determined and which could also be exacerbated by conditions throughout early development.