PURPOSE: to characterize and compare, by means of behavioral tests, the auditory processing of students with an interdisciplinary diagnosis of (I) learning disorder, (II) dyslexia and (III) students with good academic performance. METHODS: thirty students ranging from the ages 8 to 16 year old, from both genders, took part in this study and were divided as follows: Group I (GI): composed of 10 students with interdisciplinary diagnosis of learning disabilities. Group II (GII): composed of 10 students with dyslexia diagnosis. Group III (GIII): composed of 10 students, attending grades two to four, with good academic performance, paired up according to gender and age with groups I and II. A basic auditory evaluation and an evaluation of central auditory processing were conducted. RESULTS: the students of GIII showed statistically superior performance in auditory processing tests compared to the students of GI and GII. GI showed lower performance in auditory abilities assessed in the tests of dichotic digits, alternating dissyllable, pediatric speech intelligibility, sound localization, memory for verbal and non-verbal sounds, and GII also showed the same changes as GI, except in the pediatric speech intelligibility test. CONCLUSION: the students with learning disabilities showed lower performance in auditory processing tests, and the students with learning disorders had the highest number of altered abilities when compared with the students with dyslexia, which can be explained by the fact that this group shows reduced sustained attention. The dyslexia group showed alterations derived from the difficulty related to the auditory stimulus encoding and decoding.
Auditory perception; Hearing disorders; Learning disorders; Dyslexia
