Auditory processing disorder is described as a
mixture of unrefined listening skills which, despite normal
hearing, causes poor speech perception. These difficulties
have also been reported in children with a diagnosis of
language impairment (LI), literacy difficulties (LD)1, and
attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The
purpose of this study is to describe and compare the listening
performance of typically developing (TD) children with
those diagnosed with LI, LD, and ADHD on an assessment
battery of auditory processing (AP) and language processing
(LP). One hundred and one TD children and 53 children
with a clinical diagnosis were assessed using four subtests
of AP presenting linguistic stimuli, three AP subtests with
non-linguistic stimuli and an assessment of LP. Parents of
all children were required to fill in a questionnaire related
to their listening difficulties. Parental report for the TD
group on average yielded the lowest score, indicating fewer
difficulties with listening skills in the TD group. The listening
difficulties exhibited in the Maltese participants diagnosed
with LI, LD and ADHD were mainly specific to the AP
subtests using linguistic stimuli. The LI and LD groups
generally performed significantly worse than the TD group
on all AP subtests using linguistic stimuli, while the ADHD
group performed significantly worse than the TD group on
some of these tests. The same pattern did not emerge for the
subtests using non-linguistic stimuli. Few significant effects
between groups were evident. The LI groups were found to
perform the weakest in all tests of language processing.peer-reviewe
