By Beula Magimairaj, Ph.D., CCC-SLP
Listening difficulties occur in children diagnosed with auditory processing disorders (also known as central auditory processing disorders) and may co-occur in children who have developmental language disorder or attention/memory deficits. Persistent listening difficulties negatively affect children's learning and functioning. Studying factors that influence children’s listening performance using a unified multidisciplinary approach is crucial to better identify and manage deficits that contribute to listening difficulties in children.
For our paper published in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics in June 2020, we examined children’s susceptibility to auditory distraction and its relation to working memory capacity in 125 school-age children. Children were 7 to 11 years old and had typical-range hearing and nonverbal IQ scores.
In papers published by ERG scientist Beula Magimairaj, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, researchers report that children’s susceptibility to background auditory distraction does not diminish with age, and that children with listening difficulties needed a greater signal-to-noise ratio than children with no listening difficulties.
We found that the children’s susceptibility to background auditory distraction did not diminish with age. We also did not find a significant association between this susceptibility and children’s working memory capacity. Since children’s working memory improvements with age do not appear to help them ignore sound distractions, it is crucial to enhance target speech in children’s learning environments.
In another study, published in the American Journal of Audiology in August 2020, we compared 26 typical-hearing school-age children reported to have listening difficulties with 26 age-matched children with no listening difficulties or parent concerns, on multiple auditory, language, memory, and attention measures. Novel to our approach was using multiple tasks for working memory, measuring different aspects of language ability, and measuring the accuracy and speed of retrieving information from long-term memory/stored knowledge.
We found that children with listening difficulties needed a greater signal-to-noise ratio than children with no listening difficulties. Grammatical knowledge, nonverbal IQ, and general attention did not significantly differ between the groups. Children’s relative weakness in select abilities such as sentence recall, making inferences, short-term memory, and word retrieval speed and accuracy from long-term memory suggested these as areas to be considered in evaluating children with listening difficulties.
Overall group scores of children with listening difficulties were not low enough to be classified as clinically poor. This is consistent with evidence that many children assessed for auditory processing problems do not fulfill diagnostic criteria even though they present with comorbid learning problems.
Importantly, functional difficulties in children with listening difficulties as reported by parents were more significant relative to children’s formal test results. This indicated that commonly used assessments may not fully capture the children’s listening challenges.
Children with listening difficulties often slip through the cracks due to their varying symptoms and test scores. As a result, they miss a critical time window for learning and have cascading difficulties in academic and social functioning. Evidence from our studies sheds light on some sensitive areas for assessment and intervention in these children. Our most recent data, published in a November 2020 PLOS ONE paper, show that larger word knowledge, stronger vocabulary networks, and accurate and efficient retrieval of stored knowledge from long-term memory help children perform significantly better while listening in complex auditory situations.
Providing children assistive listening devices to enhance auditory input, contextualized robust language-based intervention, and educational supports are important, and can be best achieved when a child’s difficulties are discussed using a framework of multiple sources of potential deficits instead of a single, discipline-specific, diagnostic label. This multidisciplinary approach can help avoid confusion that parents face regarding appropriate management.
A 2015 Emerging Research Grants (ERG) scientist generously funded by the General Grand Chapter Royal Arch Masons International, Beula Magimairaj, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, is a research scientist at Utah State University.
