Auditory and language processing skills in Maltese children : a comparative study

Abstract

Auditory processing disorder is described as a mixture of unrefined listening skills which, despite normal hearing, causes poor speech perception. These difficulties have also been reported in children with a diagnosis of language impairment (LI), literacy difficulties (LD)1, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The purpose of this study is to describe and compare the listening performance of typically developing (TD) children with those diagnosed with LI, LD, and ADHD on an assessment battery of auditory processing (AP) and language processing (LP). One hundred and one TD children and 53 children with a clinical diagnosis were assessed using four subtests of AP presenting linguistic stimuli, three AP subtests with non-linguistic stimuli and an assessment of LP. Parents of all children were required to fill in a questionnaire related to their listening difficulties. Parental report for the TD group on average yielded the lowest score, indicating fewer difficulties with listening skills in the TD group. The listening difficulties exhibited in the Maltese participants diagnosed with LI, LD and ADHD were mainly specific to the AP subtests using linguistic stimuli. The LI and LD groups generally performed significantly worse than the TD group on all AP subtests using linguistic stimuli, while the ADHD group performed significantly worse than the TD group on some of these tests. The same pattern did not emerge for the subtests using non-linguistic stimuli. Few significant effects between groups were evident. The LI groups were found to perform the weakest in all tests of language processing.