Auditory selective attention and language processing in children with and without specific language impairment
Item
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Title
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Auditory selective attention and language processing in children with and without specific language impairment
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:757958cda005:10944
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identifier
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11211
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Creator
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Victorino, Kristen Russo,
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Contributor
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Richard G. Schwartz
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Date
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2011
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Speech therapy | Cognitive psychology | Developmental psychology | attention | executive function | language processing | SLI | working memory
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Abstract
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There is a growing consensus that children with specific language impairment (SLI) have impairments in basic cognitive functions that underlie linguistic performance deficits. One such function is attention and its control. Selective attention involves the cognitive control of attention directed towards a relevant stimulus and a simultaneous inhibition of attention towards irrelevant stimuli.;In this study, a novel paradigm was used to gain information about the way children with typical language development (TLD) and with SLI attend to and process linguistic stimuli. Participants listened to words through headphones and were instructed to attend to the words in one ear while ignoring the words in the other ear. They were simultaneously presented with pictures and asked to make a lexical (same/different) decision. The pictures either matched the attended word, the unattended word, or were unrelated. A baseline condition utilized the cross-modal decision task in the absence of distracters. The groups performed with similar accuracy. Analysis of reaction time (RT) revealed main effects for Group and Condition. Analysis of patterns of performance within groups indicated that increasing levels of interference resulted in slower RTs for the TLD group. These data suggest that subjects with TLD actively inhibited competing stimuli in the unattended channel and selected the relevant stimuli efficiently. Subjects with SLI performed with a different pattern; they did not process competing stimuli differently from non-competing stimuli in the unattended channel. These results suggest that subjects with SLI had difficulty inhibiting distractors of all types. Analysis of supplemental task performance revealed deficits in the SLI group on tasks of verbal working memory and visuo-spatial executive function, but no group differences in basic dichotic listening skills. Correlations between experimental task performance, language scores, nonverbal intelligence scores, and supplemental task scores were examined. Moderate correlations between performance on the auditory selective attention task and the working memory task, as well as on the nonverbal intelligence measure, suggested that a common construct contributed to performance on these measures. However, regression analyses revealed that these factors did not adequately account for the variance in experimental RTs, suggesting that additional, unidentified factors were also at play.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Speech and Hearing Sciences
