Background: Although central auditory processing disorder (CAPD) test battery performance has
been examined in adults with neurologic lesions of the central auditory nervous system
(CANS), similar data on children being referred for CAPD evaluations are sparse.
Purpose: This study characterizes CAPD test battery performance in children using tests commonly
administered to diagnose the disorder. Specifically, this study describes failure
rates for various test combinations, relationships between CAPD tests used in the
battery, and the influence of cognitive function on CAPD test performance and CAPD
diagnosis. A comparison is also made between the performance of children with CAPD
and data from patients with neurologic lesions of the CANS.
Research Design: A retrospective study.
Study Sample: Fifty-six pediatric patients were referred for CAPD testing.
Data Collection and Analysis: Participants were administered four CAPD tests, including frequency patterns (FP),
low-pass filtered speech (LPFS), dichotic digits (DD), and competing sentences (CS).
In addition, they were given the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC).
Descriptive analyses examined the failure rates of various test combinations, as well
as how often children with CAPD failed certain combinations when compared with adults
with CANS lesions. A principal components analysis was performed to examine interrelationships
between tests. Correlations and regressions were conducted to determine the relationship
between CAPD test performance and the WISC.
Results: Results showed that the FP and LPFS tests were most commonly failed by children with
CAPD. Two-test combinations that included one or both of these two tests and excluded
DD tended to be failed more often. Including the DD and CS test in a battery benefited
specificity. Tests thought to measure interhemispheric transfer tended to be correlated.
Compared with adult patients with neurologic lesions, children with CAPD tended to
fail LPFS more frequently and DD less frequently. Both groups failed FP with relatively
equal frequency.
Conclusions: The two-test combination that showed the highest failure rate for children with CAPD
was LPFS-FP. Comparison with adults with CANS lesions, however, suggests that the
mechanisms underlying LPFS performance in children need to be better understood. The
two-test combination that showed the next highest failure rates among children with
CAPD and did not include LPFS was CS-FP. If it is desirable to use a dichotic measure
that has a lower linguistic load than CS then DD can be substituted for CS despite
the slightly lower failure rate of the DD-FP battery.
Key Words
central auditory processing disorder - dichotic listening - temporal processing -
monaural low redundancy - neuro-audiology
