Auditory skills and neural encoding in children with speech sound disorder.

The sample was small: 28 children analysed, after 42 of 70 screened were excluded. It was cross-sectional, so it cannot show that auditory skill problems caused phonological disorder. The control group was recruited by convenience snowball sampling and did not receive the full speech-language diagnostic battery, so typical speech status relied on parent report and observation. The control group was not required to have normal behavioral auditory tests, and several controls had altered dichotic digit or questionnaire results, which weakens the comparison. The results text and the table disagree about whether O latency and A-O shift were significant. The spectrogram analysis included only one child from each group, and the authors say it should not be generalised. The paper does not say whether the raters knew which group each child belonged to. The parent questionnaire may have been difficult for this population, and the authors suggest this could have affected results.

No funding or conflicts of interest were declared.

Do not conclude that a child with phonological disorder has an auditory processing disorder or needs auditory training. The study found a group difference only in dichotic digit responses, while temporal resolution and parent-reported auditory behavior did not differ, and it cannot show that auditory problems caused the speech disorder.