Dichotic training.

Abstract

Children (aged 7-10 yrs) who were referred because of learning disabilities and found to have abnormal SSW scores were divided into Experimental and Control Groups. All had essentially normal pure-tone ac HTLs, tympanograms, and W-22 word discrimination scores. Pre-therapy baselines were also obtained on a speech-to-noise (S-in-N) task, a test of phonemic synthesis (PS) and a new procedure with staggered dichotic digits (SDD) patterned after the SSW. The therapy for the 5 Exper. Ss consisted of 15 lessons, given 1 hr each, 2 per week, using staggered dichotic digits [termed Digit Offset Therapy (DOT)]. The "competing" portion of the items ranged from complete overlap to 500-msec separation. The therapy program began with the most widely separated items first, followed by those with greater overlap in the succeeding lessons. Following DOT, the original test battery was readministered to both groups. During the therapy, significant improvement was noted for the Exper. Grp from Sessions 5 through 15 (less than .05 level) compared to the pre-therapy baseline. On the central tests, pre- and post-therapy, the Exper. Grp improved significantly over the Controls (.01 level) on the SDD test. There were also trends toward improvement for the Exper. Grp over the Controls on the SSW and S-in-N tests but neither reached statistical significance. Neither group improved in PS. Explanations for the test findings are discussed.