The influence of (central) auditory processing disorder on the severity of speech-sound disorders in children

Abstract

Objective: To identify a cutoff value based on the Percentage of Consonants Correct-Revised index that could indicate the likelihood of a child with a speech-sound disorder also having a (central) auditory processing disorder .

Methods: Language, audiological and (central) auditory processing evaluations were administered. The participants were 27 subjects with speech-sound disorders aged 7 to 10 years and 11 months who were divided into two different groups according to their (central) auditory processing evaluation results.

Results: When a (central) auditory processing disorder was present in association with a speech disorder, the children tended to have lower scores on phonological assessments. A greater severity of speech disorder was related to a greater probability of the child having a (central) auditory processing disorder. The use of a cutoff value for the Percentage of Consonants Correct-Revised index successfully distinguished between children with and without a (central) auditory processing disorder.

Conclusions: The severity of speech-sound disorder in children was influenced by the presence of (central) auditory processing disorder. The attempt to identify a cutoff value based on a severity index was successful.

Figure 1

Distribution of the children according to the number of impaired auditory skills associated with Percentage of Consonants Correct-Revised I (a) and Percentage of Consonants Correct-Revised N (b) values.

Figure 2

ROC curves for the Percentage of Consonants Correct-Revised I (a) and the Percentage of Consonants Correct-Revised N (b) values.

Figure 3

Box-plot graph of the distribution of the PCC-R index calculated for both the Percentage of Consonants Correct-Revised N and Percentage of Consonants Correct-Revised tasks for G1 and G2.