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Exploring the role of auditory analysis in atypical compared to typical language development
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Exploring the role of auditory analysis in atypical compared to typical language development

Manon Grube, Freya E. Cooper, Sukhbinder Kumar, Tom Kelly and Timothy D. Griffiths
Hearing research, Vol.308(100), pp.129-140
02/01/2014
DOI: 10.1016/j.heares.2013.09.015
PMCID: PMC3969305
PMID: 24112877
url
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heares.2013.09.015View
Published (Version of record) Open Access

Abstract

The relationship between auditory processing and language skills has been debated for decades. Previous findings have been inconsistent, both in typically developing and impaired subjects, including those with dyslexia or specific language impairment. Whether correlations between auditory and language skills are consistent between different populations has hardly been addressed at all. The present work presents an exploratory approach of testing for patterns of correlations in a range of measures of auditory processing. In a recent study, we reported findings from a large cohort of eleven-year olds on a range of auditory measures and the data supported a specific role for the processing of short sequences in pitch and time in typical language development. Here we tested whether a group of individuals with dyslexic traits (DT group; n = 28) from the same year group would show the same pattern of correlations between auditory and language skills as the typically developing group (TD group; n = 173). Regarding the raw scores, the DT group showed a significantly poorer performance on the language but not the auditory measures, including measures of pitch, time and rhythm, and timbre (modulation). In terms of correlations, there was a tendency to decrease in correlations between short-sequence processing and language skills, contrasted by a significant increase in correlation for basic, single-sound processing, in particular in the domain of modulation. The data support the notion that the fundamental relationship between auditory and language skills might differ in atypical compared to typical language development, with the implication that merging data or drawing inference between populations might be problematic. Further examination of the relationship between both basic sound feature analysis and music-like sound analysis and language skills in impaired populations might allow the development of appropriate training strategies. These might include types of musical training to augment language skills via their common bases in sound sequence analysis. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled <Music: A window into the hearing brain>. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Audiology & Speech-Language Pathology Life Sciences & Biomedicine Neurosciences Neurosciences & Neurology Otorhinolaryngology Science & Technology

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