Paula Tallal from Rutgers University gives this great presentation on how timing is essential for language processing."Language impaired children have difficulty in both receiving and producing brief, rapidly successive signals, specifically in the tens of millisecond time range."
I'll note the important locations on the video for much of the information I write here as the video is pretty lengthy. Move to counter 7:70 for this first information: When we focus on speech (phonological processing) and study speech as a perception and production system, we can see language as a sensory - motor system. "Language impaired children have difficulty in both receiving and producing brief, rapidly successive signals, specifically in the tens of millisecond time range."
(Move time line to 16:20) Less than 40 ms is needed to distinguish phonemes. Typical children remain 85% correct when listening to sounds as small as 10 ms duration. Language impaired children fall apart when listening to sounds even as small as around 150 ms. (graph data) When sounds are presented too fast, these language impaired children (such as dyslexia, other reading and writing issues) can't hear the changes. Typical speech fall into that 'too fast' range since most sounds can be made in just 40 ms, but language impaired children need 150 ms of the sound to actually hear it. No wonder these children have difficulty with phonemic awareness! (20:40) Many basic skills happen with in this 20 - 40 ms range, including many language skills such as phonological representations, segmentation of speech into words, grammatical morphology and social interaction. It's all about time and how quickly in time you can process the information. (42:26) Rapid auditory processing at 6 months old can predict language skill at 3 yrs. This was important for ALL children, not just language impaired children. How quickly we can process auditory information directly relates to our language development. (51:40) Language impaired children are specifically impaired in rapid auditory processing. The good news is rapid auditory processing can be improved with training.
If you want to check your own and your older child's auditory processing speed, click here.
