Auditory and visual sustained attention in children with speech sound disorder

• Published in: PloS one 2014-03, Vol.9 (3), p.e93091-e93091
• Main Authors: Murphy, Cristina F B, Pagan-Neves, Luciana O, Wertzner, Haydée F, Schochat, Eliane
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Analysis of Variance; Attention; Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder; Auditory perception; Auditory tasks; Biology and Life Sciences; Case-Control Studies; Child; Children; Comorbidity; Data storage; Dyslexia; Ethics; False alarms; Female; Humans; Language; Language disorders; Language processing; Male; Medical research; Medicine; Medicine and Health Sciences; Memory; Natural language processing; Neuropsychological Tests; Neurosciences; Occupational therapy; Pathology; Pediatrics; Phonetics; Phonics; Phonological memory; Physical therapy; Psychomotor Performance; Reading disabilities; Reproducibility of Results; Sensory integration; Short term memory; Social Sciences; Solid state devices; Sound; Specific language impairment; Speech; Speech disorders; Speech Sound Disorder - diagnosis; Speech Sound Disorder - physiopathology; Speech therapy; Studies; Visual perception; Visual tasks
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0093091

Although research has demonstrated that children with specific language impairment (SLI) and reading disorder (RD) exhibit sustained attention deficits, no study has investigated sustained attention in children with speech sound disorder (SSD). Given the overlap of symptoms, such as phonological memory deficits, between these different language disorders (i.e., SLI, SSD and RD) and the relationships between working memory, attention and language processing, it is worthwhile to investigate whether deficits in sustained attention also occur in children with SSD. A total of 55 children (18 diagnosed with SSD (8.11 ± 1.231) and 37 typically developing children (8.76 ± 1.461)) were invited to participate in this study. Auditory and visual sustained-attention tasks were applied. Children with SSD performed worse on these tasks; they committed a greater number of auditory false alarms and exhibited a significant decline in performance over the course of the auditory detection task. The extent to which performance is related to auditory perceptual difficulties and probable working memory deficits is discussed. Further studies are needed to better understand the specific nature of these deficits and their clinical implications.