Original Research Article
Year: 2018 | Month: November | Volume: 8 | Issue: 11 | Pages: 209-216
Association between Auditory Memory and Performance on Dichotic Digit Test
Piyush Sone1, C S Vanaja2
1Doctoral Students (Speech Language Pathology), 2Professor and Head,
Department of Audiology and Speech Language Pathology, School of Audiology & Speech Language Pathology, Bharati Vidyapeeth Deemed to be University, Pune, India.
Corresponding Author: Piyush Sone
ABSTRACT
Background: Present study was designed to investigate the effect of auditory memory on the performance of SDT and DDT for Marathi speaking typically developing children and children at risk for CAPD in the age range of 6 to 8 years.
Method: A total 60 typically developing children and nine children with risk for central auditory processing disorder were compared on performance of Single digit dichotic test (SDT) and Double Dichotic Digit Test (DDT) in Marathi. Single correct scores for right ear (RS); left ear (LS); double correct scores (DS); and ear difference (ED) were calculated separately.
Results: All participants showed better performance on SDT than those of DDT, for all the parameters. Children at risk for CAPD performed significantly poor on single correct score of right ear and ear difference of DDT. Result of Spearman’s correlation showed significant moderate correlation between memory span and single correct score of left ear, double correct score of DDT among typically developing children. Performance on single correct score of left ear and double correct score of the DDT of participants of children with memory span four or more than four was significantly better than those of children with memory span less than four.
Conclusion: Present study suggests that for children in the age range of 6 to 8 years DDT is better tool than SDT in detection binaural integration deficits. Evidences obtained from this study support the notion that auditory memory affects the performance of the dichotic listening skills.
Key words: Dichotic listening, Single and double pair dichotic digit test, Binaural integration, CAPD, Memory span