Auditory processing deficits in a teenager with Landau-Kleffner syndrome

Abstract

This study explores the auditory processing skills of a 14-year-old boy (William) with an acquired aphasia, diagnosed as Landau-Kleffner syndrome. A single case study design was implemented, with the use of both chronological age-matched and receptive-language-matched control participants. Tasks were designed to investigate non-linguistic and linguistic auditory processing. The results indicated that William had intact peripheral hearing and gap detection abilities. However, William was significantly impaired at detecting a tone presented before or during some masking noise. William also showed significant impairments in three auditory processing tasks, requiring discrimination of both word and non-word stimuli. Findings suggest that William has an auditory processing deficit affecting the perception and discrimination of linguistic and some non-linguistic stimuli.