Poor Auditory Task Scores in Children With Specific Reading and Language Difficulties: Some Poor Scores Are More Equal Than Others

Children with specific reading disability (SRD) or specific language impairment (SLI), who scored poorly on an auditory discrimination task, did up to 140 runs on the failed task. Forty-one percent of the children produced widely fluctuating scores that did not improve across runs (untrainable errant performance), 23% produced widely fluctuating scores in early runs that did improve across runs (trainable errant performance), 26% produced stable poor scores that did not improve across runs (untrainable nonerrant poor performance), and 23% produced stable poor scores that did improve across runs (trainable nonerrant performance). In most cases, trainable and untrainable errant performance, and nonerrant poor performance, could be predicted from a child's first two auditory task scores. These results illustrate that poor auditory task scores produced by children with SRD and SLI do not reflect a unitary deficit, do not necessarily reflect poor perception, and do not always respond to training.