Speech perception in noise: exploring the effect of linguistic context in children with and without auditory processing disorder.

Objective: The objective of this study was to investigate whether the speech perception problems in noise of children with auditory processing disorder (APD) stem from an auditory or a higher order dysfunction.

Design: A repeated measures design comparing the sentence key word recognition scores of children with APD and a control group was used. Four sentence lists from the Test de phrases dans le bruit (TPB) were presented with a babble masker at four different signal-to-noise ratios. The TPB is a Canadian French adaptation of the speech perception in noise test.

Study Sample: Ten participants between 9-12 years with APD participated in this study, as well as ten age- and gender-matched children with no sign of APD.

Results: Group analyses revealed that children with APD had poorer overall sentence key word recognition scores than the control group. Analysis of the difference scores between the high and low predictability sentences indicated that the benefit derived from linguistic context is similar between the groups. However, individual patterns of results revealed different profiles within the APD group.

Conclusion: Further study using a larger sample is warranted to deepen our understanding of the nature of APD and identify characteristic profiles to enable better tailoring of therapeutic programs.