Blomberg Rina, Danielsson Henrik, Rudner Mary, Söderlund Göran B W, Rönnberg Jerker
Disability Research Division, Institute for Behavioral Science and Learning, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden.
Faculty of Teacher Education Arts and Sports, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Sogndal, Norway.
Front Psychol. 2019 Jul 5;10:1536. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01536. eCollection 2019.
The large body of research that forms the ease of language understanding (ELU) model emphasizes the important contribution of cognitive processes when listening to speech in adverse conditions; however, speech-in-noise (SIN) processing is yet to be thoroughly tested in populations with cognitive deficits. The purpose of the current study was to contribute to the field in this regard by assessing SIN performance in a sample of adolescents with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and comparing results with age-matched controls. This population was chosen because core symptoms of ADHD include developmental deficits in cognitive control and working memory capacity and because these top-down processes are thought to reach maturity during adolescence in individuals with typical development. The study utilized natural language sentence materials under experimental conditions that manipulated the dependency on cognitive mechanisms in varying degrees. In addition, participants were tested on cognitive capacity measures of complex working memory-span, selective attention, and lexical access. Primary findings were in support of the ELU-model. Age was shown to significantly covary with SIN performance, and after controlling for age, ADHD participants demonstrated greater difficulty than controls with the experimental manipulations. In addition, overall SIN performance was strongly predicted by individual differences in cognitive capacity. Taken together, the results highlight the general disadvantage persons with deficient cognitive capacity have when attending to speech in typically noisy listening environments. Furthermore, the consistently poorer performance observed in the ADHD group suggests that auditory processing tasks designed to tax attention and working memory capacity may prove to be beneficial clinical instruments when diagnosing ADHD.
构成语言理解易化（ELU）模型的大量研究强调了在不利条件下听语音时认知过程的重要贡献；然而，噪声中的语音（SIN）处理在认知缺陷人群中尚未得到充分测试。本研究的目的是通过评估患有注意力缺陷多动障碍（ADHD）的青少年样本的SIN表现，并将结果与年龄匹配的对照组进行比较，在这方面为该领域做出贡献。选择这一人群是因为ADHD的核心症状包括认知控制和工作记忆能力的发育缺陷，并且因为这些自上而下的过程被认为在发育正常的个体中在青春期达到成熟。该研究在实验条件下使用自然语言句子材料，这些条件在不同程度上操纵了对认知机制的依赖性。此外，还对参与者进行了复杂工作记忆广度、选择性注意力和词汇通达的认知能力测量测试。主要研究结果支持ELU模型。年龄与SIN表现显著相关，在控制年龄后，ADHD参与者在实验操作上比对照组表现出更大的困难。此外，个体认知能力的差异强烈预测了总体SIN表现。综上所述，结果突出了认知能力不足的人在典型嘈杂聆听环境中听语音时普遍存在的劣势。此外，在ADHD组中观察到的持续较差表现表明，旨在考验注意力和工作记忆能力的听觉处理任务可能被证明是诊断ADHD时有益的临床工具。
