If the phonetic content is clearly discernable from the noise and easily matched to pre-existing linguistic representations, then the brain can implicitly comprehend the speech in a rapid, unimpeded fashion. The model is built upon of large body of research, which demonstrates that effective speech-understanding in noise (SIN) requires complex interactions between both bottom-up and top-down processing (for review, see Stenfelt and Rönnberg, 2009).īottom-up processing proceeds automatically and encompasses the auditory system’s ability to parse and decode the phonetic content of speech and to transiently match/compare that content in working memory with pre-existing lexical and semantic representations in long-term memory. The ease of language understanding (ELU) model ( Rönnberg et al., 2013, 2019), which underpins the main theoretical perspective in the current research, provides an overarching account of the role that auditory, linguistic, and cognitive mechanisms play in relation to speech understanding. Maturation of the auditory system over the first decade is undoubtedly associated with age-related improvement in speech understanding in the presence of noise however, given that both linguistic and cognitive abilities develop simultaneously with auditory abilities, it is unlikely that maturation of the auditory system alone can account for the widely observed performance differences in children that extend well into adolescence (for review, see Litovsky, 2015). Furthermore, the consistently poorer performance observed in the ADHD group suggests that auditory processing tasks designed to tax attention and working memory capacity may prove to be beneficial clinical instruments when diagnosing ADHD.Ĭhildren generally have greater difficulties than adults listening to speech in adverse conditions. Taken together, the results highlight the general disadvantage persons with deficient cognitive capacity have when attending to speech in typically noisy listening environments. In addition, overall SIN performance was strongly predicted by individual differences in cognitive capacity. Age was shown to significantly covary with SIN performance, and after controlling for age, ADHD participants demonstrated greater difficulty than controls with the experimental manipulations. Primary findings were in support of the ELU-model. In addition, participants were tested on cognitive capacity measures of complex working memory-span, selective attention, and lexical access. The study utilized natural language sentence materials under experimental conditions that manipulated the dependency on cognitive mechanisms in varying degrees. This population was chosen because core symptoms of ADHD include developmental deficits in cognitive control and working memory capacity and because these top-down processes are thought to reach maturity during adolescence in individuals with typical development. The purpose of the current study was to contribute to the field in this regard by assessing SIN performance in a sample of adolescents with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and comparing results with age-matched controls. The large body of research that forms the ease of language understanding (ELU) model emphasizes the important contribution of cognitive processes when listening to speech in adverse conditions however, speech-in-noise (SIN) processing is yet to be thoroughly tested in populations with cognitive deficits. 2Faculty of Teacher Education Arts and Sports, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Sogndal, Norway.1Disability Research Division, Institute for Behavioral Science and Learning, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden.Rina Blomberg 1 * Henrik Danielsson 1 Mary Rudner 1 Göran B.
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