Auditory processing and phonologic disorder

In a previous experiment, 30 children with speech disorder were categorized into three groups depending upon their surface phonologic error patterns: those whose errors reflected delayed development, those who consistently made nondevelopmental errors, and those whose realization of the same words was variable. The study reported here compared the three sub-groups' auditory processing skills with those of a group of control nonspeech-disordered children to test whether any particular group displayed evidence of auditory processing deficit. None of the speech-disordered groups performed any differently from the controls. The result is discussed in terms of the debate concerned with auditory processing as a cause of speech and language deficit.