SYSTEMATIC ASSESSMENT OF SELECTIVE LANGUAGE LISTENING DEFICIT IN EMOTIONALLY DISTURBED PRE-SCHOOL CHILDREN

SUMMARY In an automated free‐play T.V. game, normal and disturbed children were‐ allowed to select their preference for either the‐ natural T.V. soundtrack or a soundtrack progressively degraded by addition of regulated noise interference. The normal children decisively rejected the less intelligible soundtrack, hut the disturbed children listened to the less intelligible speech almost as much as to the natural soundtrack. The data suggest that non‐selective listening in the disturbed children indicates a primary dysfunction of receptive language organization, measurable by this technique in objective numerical terms. The discussion considers implications in terms of etiology, systematic evaluation, and further research.