DEFICITS IN AUDITORY TEMPORAL AND SPECTRAL RESOLUTION IN LANGUAGE-IMPAIRED CHILDREN

Between 3 and 6 per cent of children who are otherwise unimpaired have extreme difficulties producing and understanding spoken language(1). This disorder is typically labelled specific language impairment. Chil dren diagnosed with specific language impairment often have accompanyi ng reading difficulties (dyslexia)(2), but not all children with readi ng difficulties have specific language impairment(3). Some researchers claim that language impairment arises from failures specific to langu age or cognitive processing(4-6). Others hold that language impairment results from a more elemental problem that makes affected children un able to hear the acoustic distinctions among successive brief sounds i n speech(7-11). Here we report the results of psychophysical tests emp loying simple tones and noises showing that children with specific lan guage impairment have severe auditory perceptual deficits for brief bu t not long tones in particular sound contexts. Our data support the vi ew that language difficulties result from problems in auditory percept ion, and provide further information about the nature of these percept ual problems that should contribute to improving the diagnosis and tre atment of language impairment and related disorders.