Central Hearing Loss in Children with Developmental Dysphasia

Overview

Summary:
Some studies have focused on children with severe comprehension problems, asking how far their difficulties are auditory or linguistic. Disorders of speech comprehension are typical for all of the patients with central auditory processing disorders (CAPD). Auditory-phonological processing presents the heterogenity of specific language impairment (SLI). At the heart of SLI there is an impairment of auditory perception. We attempted to establish dichotic and binaural central tests for dichotic listening in Czech. We used two-syllabic words or short sentences like stimuli. Results in our group of 70 pre-school children (6–7 years old) confirmed integration deficit and problems with quality of short-time memory. 64% of children suffering from SLI perceived only 1 word from two-word sentence during dichotic listening. Only 13% children out of 70 managed to repeat all 2 two-syllabic words like children from control group. Central auditory deficits coexist with difficulties in children with specific language impairment. Memory depends on initial decoding.

Key words:
specific language impairment, dichotic listening, CAPD.