Auditory Processing Deficits in Specific Language Impairment and Specific Reading Disability:Their Effects and Treatment

Funding Activity

Website
http://purl.org/au-research/grants/nhmrc/235305

Funding Status
Closed

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Funded Activity Summary

One possible cause of specific language impairment (SLI) and specific reading disability (SRD; commonly known as dyslexia) is an inability to discriminate between sounds. Such an impairment could affect the ability to discriminate between simple speech sounds (phonemes) which are the basic building blocks for developing spoken language and reading skills. How many children with SLI or SRD have poor sound discrimination? What pattern of spoken language and reading impairments do these children have as a result of this impairment? Can poor sound discrimination be fixed? If it can, does it improve spoken language and reading impairments? And if it does, does it have an immediate effect or does it take some time to make a difference? These are some of the questions that will be addressed by this research. The answers will help us develop a training program that focuses specifically on improving the sound discrimination abilities of children who really need it. This will be a more efficient and inexpensive (if not free) than the Fast ForWord program that trains multiple non-verbal and verbal processing abilities regardless of whether a child has an impairment in all (or any) of these abilities and is therefore time consuming (approximately 80 hours) and expensive (approximately $AUD2000). The data will also help up better identify the spoken and written language profiles that characterise children who have sound discrimination deficits so we can better predict whether they would benefit from training programs such as Fast ForWord. And the data will tell use whether impaired sound discrimination can be used to predict whether infants might be at risk for later spoken language and reading problems.

Funded Activity Details

Start Date: 2003

End Date: 2005

Funding Scheme: NHMRC Project Grants

Funding Amount: $314,250.00

Funder: National Health and Medical Research Council

Research Topics

ANZSRC Field of Research (FoR)

Behavioural economics

ANZSRC Socio-Economic Objective (SEO)

There are no SEO codes available for this funding activity

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