[Can children with APD be discriminated from those with APD plus SLI by test diagnostic?]

A small number of variables already permit a reliable diagnostic classification of patients into the group "Auditory Processing Disorder" (APD) or unimpaired (Non-APD) in second-graders of primary schools.

To test whether the separation of children into the diagnostic group APD or SLI (Specific Language Impairment)+APD-symptomatology or Non-APD is possible, stepwise discrimination analysis were performed with 10 variables from the database of the study from Kiese-Himmel & Nickisch (2012).

Two clinically and diagnostically confirmed groups of second-graders: (1) Monosymptomatic APD (n=24; mean age 7.7 [SD 0.75] years); (2) SLI + APD-symptomatology (n=21; mean age 8.0 [SD 0.55] years) and a control group of unimpaired children (Non-APD; n=48; mean age 7.6 [SD 0.49] years).

A statistical separation of each clinical group of unimpaired children functioned successfully. Children with APD were differentiated from unimpaired children via 4 variables of which 2 focused on phonological retention (non-words; sentences), and 2 on language comprehension (word understanding in background noise; dichotic word recognition). Children with SLI + APD-symptomatology were separated from unimpaired by 2 phonological retention variables. Children with APD could only be differentiated significantly from those with SLI + APD-symptomatology when introducing a linguistic variable (grammatical structure comprehension).

Answering the question whether a selective discrimination of children with APD from children with SLI + APD-symptomatology is possible respectively whether it is the same or different requires further attention.