Results: School-aged children with an SPD show a deficit in the ability to benefit from the combination of both seen and heard speech inputs under noisy environmental conditions, suggesting that these children do not benefit from multisensory integrative processing to the same extent as their typically developing peers. Improved word identification when speech was both seen and heard compared to when it was simply heard served to index multisensory speech integration. Participants identified monosyllabic words while background noise level and sensory modality (auditory-alone, visual-alone, audiovisual) were varied in pseudorandom order. Methods: We tested whether children (6вЂ“16 years) with an over-responsive SPD phenotype ( N = 12) integrated multisensory speech differently from age-matched typically-developing controls (TD: N = 12). One major theory forwarded to account for these SPDs posits a deficit in multisensory integration, such that the various sensory inputs are not appropriately integrated into the central nervous system, leading to an overwhelming sensory-perceptual environment, and in turn to the sensory-defensive phenotype observed in these individuals. What marks these individuals apart is that this sensory processing disorder (SPD) is observed in the absence of other symptom clusters that would result in a diagnosis of Autism, ADHD, or other neurodevelopmental disorders more typically associated with sensory processing difficulties. That is, they show over-responsivity in the face of entirely typical sound, light, touch, taste, or smell inputs, and this occurs to such an extent that it interferes with their daily functioning and reaches clinical levels of dysfunction.

Purpura Department of Neuroscience, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, NY, United StatesД«ackground: There exists a cohort of children and adults who exhibit an inordinately high degree of discomfort when experiencing what would be considered moderate and manageable levels of sensory input.

2The Cognitive Neurophysiology Laboratory, Department of Pediatrics, Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Medical Center, Bronx, NY, United States.

Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience, University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, Rochester, NY, United States

1The Cognitive Neurophysiology Laboratory, Department of Neuroscience, The Ernest J.

Foxe xml editor review