Selective Auditory Attention Abilities of Learning Disabled and Normal Achieving Children

Abstract

This study investigated the selective auditory attention skills of learning disabled children as compared with the performance of normal achievers aged 7 through 9 years. The task consisted of pointing to the appropriate picture of a monosyllabic word presented diotically. The task was always presented first in quiet and then under three noise (distractor) conditions: white noise (nonlinguistic), speech backwards (linguistic nonsemantic), and speech forward (semantic). The performance of the LD children was affected more than the performance of normal achievers under all distractor conditions, with the greatest difference found when the distractor was semantic. The performance of 8-year-olds was significantly better than 7-year-olds on these listening tasks. These findings suggest that LD children may be differentiated from normal achievers using a selective auditory attention task with a semantic distractor.