Performance of Children with and without Auditory Processing Disorders in Adaptive Temporal Gap Detection Measures

Children with auditory processing disorder (APD) exhibit various auditory processing deficits, including temporal processing deficits. Temporal processing abilities are assessed by estimating the gap detection threshold (GDT) as the lowest perceivable gap duration identified by the subject.

The present study attempted to examine the performance of normal-hearing children and children with APD using adaptive within-channel and across-channel gap detection tests.

Two groups of children aged between 10 and 12 years participated in the study. Group 1 included children diagnosed with APD, and group 2 included normal hearing, typically developing children (TD), with 12 participants in each group. For each subject, the lowest detectable gap duration was obtained monoaurally, using broadband noise (BBN), within-channel (narrow bands of noise centered spectrally at 2 kHz on either side of the gap), and across-channel (narrow bands of noise leading marker spectrally centered at 2 kHz and trailer marker spectrally centered at 1 kHz) gap detection tests through the Psycon platform (free).

The results of the statistical analysis revealed significant group differences only in across-channel GDT measures between the two groups. In contrast, there were no statistically significant differences between the groups in terms of either within-channel GDT or BBN GDT.

The results indicate that, compared to other stimuli, an across-channel gap detection test would be a better diagnostic test of temporal resolution to identify and assess children with APD.