[Are specific developmental language disorders caused by deficits in auditory perception?].
BACKGROUND
Specific language impairment is assumed to be caused by deficits in auditory perception and therefore the training of auditory abilities is recommended as a treatment. Our study focussed on the question of whether a correlation between language disorders and auditory perception abilities can be proven empirically.


METHODS
23 language impaired children and 52 controls aged 7 to 11 years were examined.


METHODS
Auditory abilities were measured by means of a battery of nonverbal and verbal tests. The children had to identify tones of different frequencies, loudness, duration or patterns as well as every day sounds and mixtures of such sounds. Noise-overlaid, time-compressed and frequency-limited speech tasks, and binaural summation tasks were also used. In addition, phoneme discrimination ability and auditory memory were assessed.


RESULTS
Language impaired children scored low on phoneme discrimination and auditory memory tests but not on nonverbal or verbal auditory perception tasks. There are significant correlations between their expressive language ability and their scores on phoneme discrimination, auditory memory and sound duration identification tests.


CONCLUSIONS
The results do not support the assumption that developmental language disorders are associated with auditory perception deficits. However, there are indications that auditory memory and time processing are deficient. Thus, training of auditory perception does not appear to be a suitable treatment for language impaired children.
von Suchodoletz
W
W
Institut und Poliklinik für Kinder- und Jugendpsychiatrie und Psychotherapie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.
Alberti
A
A
Berwanger
D
D
D001301:Audiometry, Pure-Tone / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D001308:Auditory Perceptual Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis*; D002648:Child; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007805:Language Development Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000209:etiology*; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D010700:Phonetics; D012016:Reference Values; D013063:Speech Discrimination Tests / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D013067:Speech Perception; D013223:Statistics as Topic; D014706:Verbal Learning