Comparison of Auditory, Language, Memory, and Attention Abilities in Children With and Without Listening Difficulties

Abstract

Objectives School-age children with and without parent-reported listening difficulties (LiD) were compared on auditory processing, language, memory, and attention abilities. The objective was to extend what is known so far in the literature about children with LiD by using multiple measures and selective novel measures across the above areas. Design Twenty-six children who were reported by their parents as having LiD and 26 age-matched typically developing children completed clinical tests of auditory processing and multiple measures of language, attention, and memory. All children had normal-range pure-tone hearing thresholds bilaterally. Group differences were examined. Results In addition to significantly poorer speech-perception-in-noise scores, children with LiD had reduced speed and accuracy of word retrieval from long-term memory, poorer short-term memory, sentence recall, and inferencing ability. Statistically significant group differences were of moderate effect size; however, standard test scores of children with LiD were not clinically poor. No statistically significant group differences were observed in attention, working memory capacity, vocabulary, and nonverbal IQ. Conclusions Mild signal-to-noise ratio loss, as reflected by the group mean of children with LiD, supported the children's functional listening problems. In addition, children's relative weakness in select areas of language performance, short-term memory, and long-term memory lexical retrieval speed and accuracy added to previous research on evidence-based areas that need to be evaluated in children with LiD who almost always have heterogenous profiles. Importantly, the functional difficulties faced by children with LiD in relation to their test results indicated, to some extent, that commonly used assessments may not be adequately capturing the children's listening challenges. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.12808607

The impact of mild-to-severe hearing loss on the neural dynamics serving verbal working memory processing in children

“…Building on this idea, the relationship between language measures and working memory capacity has been well-documented in normal- and hard-of-hearing adults ( Akeroyd, 2008 , Besser et al, 2013 , Gordon-Salant and Cole, 2016 , Hwang et al, 2017 ) and children ( Dawson et al, 2002 , Harris et al, 2013 , Kirby et al, 2019 , Lowenstein et al, 2019 , Magimairaj and Nagaraj, 2018 , Magimairaj et al, 2018 , Magimairaj et al, 2020 , McCreery et al, 2017 , McCreery et al, 2019 , Nittrouer et al, 2017 ). In the context of children with mild-to-severe hearing loss, Stiles and colleagues ( Stiles et al, 2012 ) found a significant relationship between digit span and vocabulary size in both CNH and CHL.…”

Speech Perception in Noise Predicts Oral Narrative Comprehension in Children With Developmental Language Disorder

“…Based on Moore et al (2010) and Snowling et al (2018) we predicted that tone-perception tasks would not contribute unique variance to narrative comprehension. However, we also predicted that SPiN would significantly contribute uniquely to narrative comprehension in children with DLD (Torkildsen et al, 2019;Magimairaj et al, 2020).…”

“…Children are particularly vulnerable to the effects of noise on spoken communication, and this is exacerbated for children with DLD, attention deficits, and hearing loss. In a recent study, along with poor SPiN scores, children with reported listening difficulties scored lower on STM capacity, sentence recall, inferencing ability, and reduced speed and accuracy of lexical access, compared to a control group (Magimairaj et al, 2020). Furthermore, found that lexical knowledge was crucial for auditory closure of words and sentences in children, with lexical retrieval from LTM significantly associated with the recognizing interrupted sentences.…”

“…Large-scale studies have shown that there are no strong associations between auditory processing test results and listening complaints (Moore et al, 2010;Ahmmed et al, 2014;Tomlin et al, 2015). However, more robust associations between listening concerns and language impairment have been consistently observed (Sharma et al, 2009;Moore, 2012;Snowling et al, 2018;Magimairaj et al, 2020). Thus, although auditory processing deficits are not sufficient or necessary to cause DLD, they can be associated with poor language outcomes (Bishop et al, 1999;Dawes and Bishop, 2009;Snowling et al, 2018).…”

“…Alternatively, the poor quality of language input that children with DLD receive due to their auditory processing deficits, may affect their ability to learn new words. The differential relationships observed in typically developing children and children with DLD motivates further examination of the factors that affect SPiN ability in children (Magimairaj et al, 2018 , 2020 ; Torkildsen et al, 2019 ). In a group comparison of 26 children with and 26 children without listening difficulties, Magimairaj et al ( 2020 ) found that scores of children with listening concerns were significantly lower in speech perception in noise, short-term memory capacity, sentence recall, inferencing, and word retrieval speed and accuracy.…”