Auditory frequency discrimination in preschool and school-age children with specific language impairment

Abstract

The view of “perceptual processing deficits” in children with specific language impairment (SLI) emphasized that the detection and discrimination of basic acoustic components contributed to their difficulties in higher linguistic process. The purpose of this study was to examine the auditory frequency discrimination in Mandarin-speaking children with SLI across ages. Eighteen 5-year-old SLI and 18 age-matched controls, 20 8-year-old SLI and 20 controls participated. All the participants were assessed by the standardized intelligence and language tests. In the computerized auditory frequency discrimination task, children were asked to do AX discrimination of 1000-1030Hz and 1000-1070 Hz in conditions with and without noise masking. A mixed ANOVA was used to examine the effects of group, frequency difference, and masking conditions. The results showed that both preschool and school-age children with SLI performed significantly poorer on the frequency discrimination compared to the controls, especially in the masking condition. The preschoolers performed poorer on the frequency difference of 30 Hz than 70 Hz, but the school-age children performed similarly on both frequency differences. Individuals’ frequency discrimination were positively correlated with their language performance across two ages. These results suggest that deficits in frequency discrimination in children with SLI are important to their language difficulties.