HOME HELP FEEDBACK SUBSCRIPTIONS ARCHIVE SEARCH TABLE OF CONTENTS		QUICK SEARCH:   [advanced] Author: Keyword(s): Year:  Vol:  Page:

This Article Full Text Full Text (PDF) Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in PubMed Alert me to new issues of the journal My Folders Download to citation manager Citing Articles Citing Articles via HighWire Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Corriveau, K. Articles by Goswami, U. Search for Related Content PubMed PubMed Citation Articles by Corriveau, K. Articles by Goswami, U. Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

Basic Auditory Processing Skills and Specific Language Impairment: A New Look at an Old Hypothesis

Contact author: Usha Goswami, Centre for Neuroscience, Faculty of Education, 184 Hills Road, Cambridge CB2 8PQ, United Kingdom. E-mail: ucg10{at}cam.ac.uk.

Purpose: To explore the sensitivity of children with specific language impairment (SLI) to amplitude-modulated and durational cues that are important for perceiving suprasegmental speech rhythm and stress patterns.

Method: Sixty-three children between 7 and 11 years of age were tested, 21 of whom had a diagnosis of SLI, 21 of whom were matched for chronological age to the SLI sample, and 21 of whom were matched for language age to the SLI sample. All children received a battery of nonspeech auditory processing tasks along with standardized measures of phonology and language.

Results: As many as 70%–80% of children diagnosed with SLI were found to perform below the 5th percentile of age-matched controls in auditory processing tasks measuring sensitivity to amplitude envelope rise time and sound duration. Furthermore, individual differences in sensitivity to these cues predicted unique variance in language and literacy attainment, even when age, nonverbal IQ, and task-related (attentional) factors were controlled.

Conclusion: Many children with SLI have auditory processing difficulties, but for most children, these are not specific to brief, rapidly successive acoustic cues. Instead, sensitivity to durational and amplitude envelope cues appear to predict language and literacy outcomes more strongly. This finding now requires replication and exploration in languages other than English.

KEY WORDS: phonology, auditory processing, speech and language

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Facebook    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?

This article has been cited by other articles:

				D. A. Abrams, T. Nicol, S. Zecker, and N. Kraus Abnormal Cortical Processing of the Syllable Rate of Speech in Poor Readers J. Neurosci., June 17, 2009; 29(24): 7686 - 7693. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]