The development of the Cantonese Pediatric Lexical Tone Dichotic Listening Test (CaPeLeToDLT) computerized testing platform to identity young children with central auditory processing disorders

Dichotic listening (DL) testing is a sensitive and powerful tool to investigate how efficient speech sounds is being processed by the two ears up to the cerebral hemispheres connected to them. During DL testing, two different speech stimuli are presented simultaneously to the testee's ears to trigger identification response. Divided Attention DL testing can assess the bottom-up stimulus driven auditory processing discrepancies of the left ear-right brain-left brain channel versus the right ear-left-brain channel to access the maturation of the central auditory nervous system. In addition, Directed Attention DL testing can access the top-down instructional driven auditory processing competence on allocating attentional resources for cognitive processing. The right ear-left ear performance differences, e.g., right ear advantage or the left ear one, informs whether a child's auditory processing development is in fact typical or disordered. Delayed or deviant development in DL listening may hinder children's processing capacity, i.e. enhancing the processing of multiple streams or inhibiting the processing of unimportant streams of acoustic-phonetic speech information for learning, language, and cognitive development. Copyright © 2022 EDTECH Conference.