Assessment of dichotic listening in the dyslexic child

Abstract

Among the various tests used for assessing speech sounds recognition in competing speech perception,there is a growing interest in using the dichotic listening test also for children above eight years of age.Dichotic listening consists in presenting different speech material (spondees, digits or adjectives) to bothears simultaneously; the subject then has to verbally reproduce either all the perceived words (free recall) oronly those perceived in one ear (directed attention). This behavioral technique measures the ability tobinaurally separate and integrate information, a crucial skill for speech sound feature extraction in thepresence of concurrent auditory information. Here we aimed at investigating further the relative weaknessof dichotic listening skills in dyslexic children more particularly the skills allowing the binaural separation.For this, dichotic aptitudes in a group of dyslexic children were compared with those of gender-, manuallaterality- and age-matched controls. In line with literature data, dyslexic children were found to havedeteriorated dichotic listening skills. The deterioration was found to equally affect the right ear and the leftear. In addition, directed auditory attention and attentional shift index were also found to be impaired. Theresults support the hypothesis that comorbidity between developmental reading disorder and centralauditory processing disorder might occur.