Thus, the LDN group showed deficits in attention switching and inhibitory control, whereas only a subset of these participants demonstrated an additional frequency resolution deficit.

The aim of this research was to evaluate the ability to switch attention and selectively attend to relevant information in children (10–15 years) with persistent listening difficulties in noisy environments. A wide battery of clinical tests indicated that children with complaints of listening difficulties had otherwise normal hearing sensitivity and auditory processing skills. Here we show that these children are markedly slower to switch their attention compared to their age-matched peers. The results suggest poor attention switching, lack of response inhibition and/or poor listening effort consistent with a predominantly top-down (central) information processing deficit. A deficit in the ability to switch attention across talkers would provide the basis for this otherwise hidden listening disability, especially in noisy environments involving multiple talkers such as classrooms.

Comodulation masking release is a phenomenon that improves the detectability of a masked pure tone or speech signal by addition of a coherently amplitude-modulated energy above and/or the signal frequency. The majority of the studies done on comodulation masking release have studied threshold detection for a pure tone, or speech identification at or near threshold levels with a favorable signal-to-noise ratio. Moreover, various studies examining comodulation masking release under conditions of reduced frequency selectivity in listeners with cochlear hearing impairment indicate absence or reduced comodulation of masking release effect (Hall et al., 1984; Hall and Grose, 1985; Moore et al., 1993). In the current study, the speech recognition task was studied for the CMR effect at supra-threshold level and unfavorable signal-to-noise ratio of −10 dB. Results indicated absent CMR effect at supra-threshold level for the word recognition task for normal-hearing individuals.