The Effect of Auditory Distraction on the Auditory Word Repetition Performance of Children with ADHD

Abstract

Educators have observed and suggested that an appropriate seating arrangement is vital for the classroom performance of children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (CADHD). The current study attempts to find a cognitive reason for this observation by exploring whether CADHD are distracted by classroom noises from different locations. The current study attempts to create an experimental setting, which is on the one hand intuitively related to the classroom situation, while also maintaining experimental control, exploring the causal relation and using a task which does not require excessive attentional resources to focus on the impact of distracters rather than on task difficulty. We explored whether CADHD are more vulnerable to auditory distracters from different locations even if an attended task does not demand excessive executive resources. CADHD and normal children verbally repeated auditorily presented familiar words. Auditorily presented random numbers from the front, left, or right of the participants were presented randomly as distracters. The results showed that the effect of distracter on error rate was significant as was the interaction effect of distracter and group. However, only distracters from the front led to significantly more errors for CADHD. The findings suggest that CADHD are vulnerable to distracters from the auditory modality even when they have to perform a simple auditory task such as repeating familiar words – in a situation intuitively akin to the classroom setting.