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Abstract
Infants' auditory processing abilities have been shown to predict subsequent language development. In addition, poor auditory processing skills have been shown for some individuals with specific language impairment. Methods used in infant studies are not appropriate for use with young children, and neither are methods typically used to test auditory processing skills in specific language impairment (SLI). The objective in this study was to develop an appropriate way of testing auditory processing skills in children in the 4-5 year age range. We report data from 49 children aged 4-5 years (mean age 58.57 months) tested on five tasks with tones and synthesized syllables. Frequencies and inter-stimulus intervals were varied in the tone tasks; the second formant transitions between consonant and vowel were varied in the syllable tasks. Consistent with past research, variability was found in children's auditory processing abilities. Significant correlations in discrimination thresholds for the tasks were found. The results from two regression analyses showed that the children's auditory processing abilities predicted significant amounts of variance for receptive and expressive language.
Key words
auditory processingchildrenlanguagesyllablestones
1 Introduction
In acquiring a spoken language, an infant must be able to process the changing speech sounds that appear in rapid succession in the input, characterized by temporal and spectral variation. Infants with efficient auditory processing systems readily detect the patterns in natural language and this enables them to move more quickly towards complex language structures (Kuhl, 2004). In contrast, deficits in the processing of auditory stimuli have been associated with developmental language delay (Tallal, 2000; Tallal & Piercy, 1973a, 1973b, 1975; Tallal, Stark, & Curtiss, 1976; Wright, 2006; Wright et al., 1997). Wright et al. (1997) argued that it is the inability to perceive brief and successive sounds of speech that results in language impairment, while Friederici (2004) argued that a deficiency in the processing of prosodic/phonological information could be the underlying problem leading to language impairment.
Evidence that efficient processing of auditory stimuli in infancy is related to subsequent language development comes from a number of behavioral and psychophysical studies.
Trehub and Henderson (1996) tested infants at 6 and 12 months of age on their discrimination of tones of 1000 and 4000 Hz with varying durations of silent intervals (inter-stimulus intervals or ISIs) separating...