November 9, 2007

This week I didn't see too many exciting things. I did have a little boy who came down as part of a speech diagnostic. He was very active and wanted to know what everything was in the clinic. We had a very difficult time keeping him on task. The child would not let me look in his ears, he said it tickled. I wasn't able to use pure tones with the child, but we were able to use speech by having the child to point to his nose and hair.

Since this was my first time testing a who was not really cooperative. I wanted to find an article that went along with testing children like this little boy, so I found an article about the auditory preferences of toddlers and children with autism spectrum disorders. The authors of this article wanted to see how children in these different groups attended to speech stimuli. The results from this study showed that children with ASD had a reduced preference for child directed speech when compared to their age matched peers. From their results they concluded that children with ASD perform differently when compared to their normal age match peers.

Reference:
Paul, R., Chawarska, K., Fowler, C., Cicchetti, D., & Volkmar, F. (2007). Listen my children and you shall hear: Auditory preferences in toddlers with autism spectrum disorders. Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research 50 (5) 1350-1354.

If you would like to read this article:
http://jslhr.asha.org/cgi/reprint/50/5/1350?maxtoshow=