Control of Auditory Attention in Children With Specific Language Impairment.
OBJECTIVE
Children with specific language impairment (SLI) appear to demonstrate deficits in attention and its control. Selective attention involves the cognitive control of attention directed toward a relevant stimulus and simultaneous inhibition of attention toward irrelevant stimuli. The current study examined attention control during a cross-modal word recognition task.


METHODS
Twenty participants with SLI (ages 9-12 years) and 20 age-matched peers with typical language development (TLD) listened to words through headphones and were instructed to attend to the words in 1 ear while ignoring the words in the other ear. They were simultaneously presented with pictures and asked to make a lexical decision about whether the pictures and auditory words were the same or different. Accuracy and reaction time were measured in 5 conditions, in which the stimulus in the unattended channel was manipulated.


RESULTS
The groups performed with similar accuracy. Compared with their peers with TLD, children with SLI had slower reaction times overall and different within-group patterns of performance by condition.


CONCLUSIONS
Children with TLD showed efficient inhibitory control in conditions that required active suppression of competing stimuli. Participants with SLI had difficulty exerting control over their auditory attention in all conditions, with particular difficulty inhibiting distractors of all types.
Kristen R
KR
Victorino
Richard G
RG
Schwartz
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D001288:Attention; D001307:Auditory Perception; D002648:Child; D056344:Executive Function; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007266:Inhibition, Psychological; D007806:Language Disorders / Q000523:psychology*; D008297:Male; D011581:Psychological Tests; D011930:Reaction Time