Speech cortical activation and connectivity in typically developing children and those with listening difficulties

Abstract

AbstractListening difficulties (LiD) in people who have normal audiometry (LiD) are a widespread but poorly understood form of hearing impairment. Recent research suggests that childhood LiD are cognitive rather than auditory in origin. We assessed that hypothesis using behavioral testing and fMRI with 43 typically developing children and 42 age matched (6-13 years old) children with LiD, categorized by caregiver report (ECLiPS). The children with LiD had clinically normal hearing. For sentence listening tasks, we found no group differences in fMRI brain cortical activation by increasingly complex speech, from phonology to intelligibility to semantics. Using resting state fMRI, we examined the temporal connectivity of cortical auditory and related speech perception networks. Significant group differences were found only in cortical connections engaged by more complex speech processing. The strength of the affected connections was related to the children’s performance on tests of dichotic listening, speech-in-noise, attention, memory and verbal vocabulary. Together, these results support the hypothesis that childhood LiD reflects cognitive and language rather than auditory deficits.