Title: Auditory scene analysis in children with auditory processing difficulties

The most frequently observed characteristic symptom of children with APD is their difficulty in degraded listening conditions such as in the presence of competing speech or background noise (Bellis, 1996; Chermak et al., 1999; Chermak, 2002). Most of the real life listening situations for children involve listening to speech in presence of background noise; an inability to do so may have a significant impact on their academic, social as well as other related aspects. There may be a variety of factors affecting speech perception in noise in children which may be broadly categorized as auditory and non-auditory factors (Erwin et al., 2007). Few of the auditory factors contributing to our ability to perceive and understand speech in noise may consist of aspects such as  peripheral hearing, auditory processing skills (including spectro-temporal processing, auditory scene analysis and localization) as well as auditory attention (selective and sustained) (Bregman, 1990; Sussman, 1993; Haykin and Chen, 2005; Fritz et al., 2007; George et al., 2007). In addition to the auditory factors, non-auditory factors such as intelligence, literacy level, contextual effects, reading ability, working memory capacity, speed of information processing and other related cognitive and higher linguistic factors may also be contributing to speech perception in a noisy environment (Gatehouse et al., 2003; Lunner, 2003; Hällgren, 2005). The current research aims to investigate the influence of auditory processing and attention on speech perception in noise for children having auditory processing difficulties and/or hearing loss.