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Auditory Processing in Specific Language Impairment (SLI): Relations With the Perception of Lexical and Phrasal Stress.


Type

Article

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Authors

Richards, Susan 

Abstract

PURPOSE: We investigated whether impaired acoustic processing is a factor in developmental language disorders. The amplitude envelope of the speech signal is known to be important in language processing. We examined whether impaired perception of amplitude envelope rise time is related to impaired perception of lexical and phrasal stress in children with specific language impairment (SLI). METHOD: Twenty-two children aged between 8 and 12 years participated in this study. Twelve had SLI; 10 were typically developing controls. All children completed psychoacoustic tasks measuring rise time, intensity, frequency, and duration discrimination. They also completed 2 linguistic stress tasks measuring lexical and phrasal stress perception. RESULTS: The SLI group scored significantly below the typically developing controls on both stress perception tasks. Performance on stress tasks correlated with individual differences in auditory sensitivity. Rise time and frequency thresholds accounted for the most unique variance. Digit Span also contributed to task success for the SLI group. CONCLUSIONS: The SLI group had difficulties with both acoustic and stress perception tasks. Our data suggest that poor sensitivity to amplitude rise time and sound frequency significantly contributes to the stress perception skills of children with SLI. Other cognitive factors such as phonological memory are also implicated.

Description

Keywords

Auditory Perception, Child, Child Language, Discrimination, Psychological, Female, Humans, Language Disorders, Language Tests, Linguistics, Male, Psychoacoustics, Regression Analysis, Speech Acoustics

Journal Title

J Speech Lang Hear Res

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

1092-4388
1558-9102

Volume Title

58

Publisher

American Speech Language Hearing Association
Sponsorship
Medical Research Council (G0902375)
Medical Research Council (G0902375/1)
This work was supported by an Economic and Social Research Council award to the first author, supervised by the second author.