Linguistic and auditory temporal processing in children with specific language impairment.
BACKGROUND
Several studies suggest the association of specific language impairment (SLI) to deficits in auditory processing. It has been evidenced that children with SLI present deficit in brief stimuli discrimination. Such deficit would lead to difficulties in developing phonological abilities necessary to map phonemes and to effectively and automatically code and decode words and sentences. However, the correlation between temporal processing (TP) and specific deficits in language disorders--such as syntactic comprehension abilities--has received little or no attention.


OBJECTIVE
To analyze the correlation between: TP (through the Frequency Pattern Test--FPT) and Syntactic Complexity Comprehension (through a Sentence Comprehension Task).


METHODS
Sixteen children with typical language development (8;9 +/- 1;1 years) and seven children with SLI (8;1 +/- 1;2 years) participated on the study.


RESULTS
Accuracy of both groups decreased with the increase on syntactic complexity (both p < 0.01). On the between groups comparison, performance difference on the Test of Syntactic Complexity Comprehension (TSCC) was statistically significant (p = 0.02).As expected, children with SLI presented FPT performance outside reference values. On the SLI group, correlations between TSCC and FPT were positive and higher for high syntactic complexity (r = 0.97) than for low syntactic complexity (r = 0.51).


CONCLUSIONS
Results suggest that FPT is positively correlated to syntactic complexity comprehension abilities.The low performance on FPT could serve as an additional indicator of deficits in complex linguistic processing. Future studies should consider, besides the increase of the sample, longitudinal studies that investigate the effect of frequency pattern auditory training on performance in high syntactic complexity comprehension tasks.
Fortunato-Tavares
Talita
T
Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade de São Paulo. tfortunato-tavares@usp.br
Rocha
Caroline Nunes
CN
Andrade
Claudia Regina Furquim de
CR
Befi-Lopes
Débora Maria
DM
Schochat
Eliane
E
Hestvik
Arild
A
Schwartz
Richard G
RG
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D002648:Child; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007806:Language Disorders / Q000503:physiopathology*; D007807:Language Tests; D008297:Male