Auditory Processing and Phonologic Disorder

Abstract

In a previous experiment, 30 children with speech disorder were categorized into three groups depending upon their surface phonologic error patterns: those whose errors reflected delayed development, those who consistently made nondevelopmental errors, and those whose realization of the same words was variable. The study reported here compared the three subgroups' auditory processing skills with those of a group of control nonspeech-disordered children to test whether any particular group displayed evidence of auditory processing deficit. None of the speech-disordered groups performed any differently from the controls. The result is discussed in terms of the debate concerned with auditory processing as a cause of speech and language deficit.

Key Words:

• Speech disorder
• Auditory processing
• Developmental disability