Specific language impairment: speech perception in relation to noise

Background: Children with specific language impairment (SLI) fail to develop age-appropriate language despite being apparently normal in other respects. Those children usually have abnormal speech perception in noise. This work is designed to investigate speech perception in background noise in those children. It included two groups of children: control group (15 children with normal typical language development) and study group (25 children diagnosed with SLI). All children were submitted to intelligence scale, language assessment, full audiological evaluation, and Arabic Pediatric Speech Intelligibility in noise test (PSI). Results: Results showed no statically significant difference in total and verbal IQ, while non-verbal IQ was significantly lower in the study group. As regard results of speech audiometry, the control group had better SRT and higher WD% than the study group. Expressive, receptive, and total language scores were lower in the study group. Arabic Pediatric Speech Intelligibility in noise test showed significantly increased PSI scores with increasing the SNR from 0 to +8dB in both groups. The comparison between both groups showed a significant higher score in the control group at different S/N recording conditions. Conclusions: Children with SLI have difficulty in speech perception when compared to typically developed language children. This difficulty is more apparent in the presence of background noise.