Ergebnisse audiologischer Testverfahren in der Diagnostik der auditiven Verarbeitungs- und Wahrnehmungsstörung (AVWS) bei Grundschulkindern

To this day, no verified reference data of (central) auditory perception and processing performance is available for children of normal hearing of primary school age. Neither is clear, so far, which measures of diagnostics might be best suited for detecting infantile Auditory Perceptual and Processing Disorders as early and reliably as possible. The aim of the present paper is to collect reference data in order to study elementary functions of auditory perception and processing in children with normal hearing by applying selected paedaudiologic testing procedures. The first test was aimed at examining binaural hearing processes as part of auditory perception and processing by testing comprehension of speech under the impact of disturbing noise. It was to be tested if and to what extent an advantage for intelligibility can be drawn from a spatially separated set-up of the sources of the useful and the interfering signal. The spatial separation of the sources of useful and interfering signal showed a distinct advantage for perceivability, i.e., the children tested were able, by an average of 50%, to correctly recognise the tested words already at significantly lower decibel levels. Thus, by exactly measuring speech comprehension under the impact of disturbing noise, binaural auditory processing could be identified as an important part of auditory perception and processing. In a second test, the ability for directional hearing (auditory localisation) in a free sound field was examined as another partial function of auditory perception and processing. It was revealed that the children were able to localise posterior or posterolateral signals significantly less accurate than signals from frontal or lateral. It could hence be elaborated that primary school children who were developed normally and with normal hearing could localise incidents of sounds coming from posterior and posterolateral significantly worse than signals coming from frontal or lateral, respectively. In a third test, the so called “Dichotic Discrimination Test” by V. Uttenweiler, the children simultaneously heard via headphones two different trisyllabic nouns and were asked to recite them all. This ability for dichotic discrimination (auditory selection) has also turned out as a sensitive parameter for assessing auditory perception and processing performance.