Vincent Jerome Schmithorst1, Scott Kerry
Holland1, Elena Plante2
1Radiology, Children's Hospital Medical
Center, Cincinnati, OH, United States; 2Speech, Language, &
Hearing Sciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, United States
A
diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) study was conducted in a cohort of
normal-hearing children ages 9-11 investigating correlations of white matter
microstructure with higher-order auditory processing tasks often used to
diagnose auditory processing disorder (APD) in children. The more difficult tasks showed negative
correlations of fractional anisotropy (FA) in the corticospinal tract with
task performance, while the easiest task showed a positive correlation. Positive correlations of FA with task
performance were also seen in white matter adjoining prefrontal and occipital
areas for some tasks. Results support
a dual-stream (dorsal and ventral) model of auditory comprehension.