Functional Listening Evaluation Performance in Children with Reading Difficulties

Listening to a degraded speech signal over time can interfere with language development and learning in children with both language and reading disorders. Some may benefit from modifications that improve access to speech in the classroom. The Functional Listening Evaluation (FLE; Johnson & Von Almen, 1997), developed for assessing classroom listening ability in children with hearing impairment, examines how noise, distance and visual input may affect speech recognition in school. The FLE might also be useful in demonstrating the need for particular accommodations in children with normal hearing who experience reading difficulties. The FLE was administered to 41 children, aged seven to ten, who were diagnosed with language impairments affecting reading. The Fisher’s Auditory Problems Checklist (Fisher, 1985) was given to participants’ parents to differentiate children with and without listening difficulties. Using BKB sentences, speech recognition scores were obtained for both groups. When key-word scoring was applied, scores were high overall for all participants. With more rigorous verbatim scoring, the group with reported listening difficulties scored lower than the group without reported listening difficulties for all FLE conditions. Within each group, distant conditions yielded significantly lower scores than close conditions. Counterintuitively, only the group without reported listening difficulties showed significantly decreased scores in the noise conditions. Absence of visual cues did not affect speech recognition for either group. The FLE was somewhat sensitive to listening difficulties noted by parents, and with modifications, may provide useful information about accommodations for children with normal hearing who are at risk academically. Introduction