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Speech and non-speech discrimination in people with specific language impairment

G. M. McArthur and D. V. M. Bishop

Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford genevieve.mcarthur@psy.ox.ac.uk

Abstract

We used psycho-acoustic tasks to test how well people with specific language impairment (SLI) discriminated between speech (vowels) and non-speech sounds (tones and complex tones) compared to people with normal spoken language skills (controls). One third of the SLI group were poor at discriminating between the frequency of tones compared to the control group and the remaining people in the SLI group. This subgroup was equally poor at discriminating between vowels and complex tones that were matched for spectral complexity. In contrast, the people with normal discrimination for tones found vowels harder to discriminate than the complex tones despite their similar complexity. This suggested that people with normal discrimination processed vowels in a unique way to non-speech sounds, while people with poor discrimination processed vowels in the same abnormal way as they processed non-speech sounds. We are now working on testing the validity of this suggestion at the level of the brain by measuring the event-related potential brain responses of our people with SLI with poor discrimination to tones, vowels, and complex tones, and comparing them to the brain responses of our controls and people with SLI with normal discrimination. This data will provide some much needed insights into the relationship between non-speech and speech discrimination at the level of behaviour and the brain.

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