The ADHD Study

In the study by Cain and Bignelli which included 66 children at risk for ADHD from the ages of 7 to 11. The children were tested by the teacher with the approved ACT-eRs test to determine what group their appropriate placement. Children whose first language was not English were excluded from the study, as were children suffering from a diagnosis of hearing, speech or language disorder. None of the children were on any type of ADHD medication. The at-risk children for ADHD were given the same reading and aural information as the control group and they were in the same learning environment. In the risk group, all the children had poorer listening comprehension then reading comprehension for matched stories. Memory and executive listening …show more content…
“The children also exhibit a marked deficit in prevalence of selection, attention to tasks, in particular in the auditory modality (Peyre, Galera,Wareden,Hoertel,Bernard,Melchior,Ramus 2016)”. The preceding study is unique in that it took place over two and a half years and the participants were all extremely young, most studies are conducted on children school age or higher. The study was done to support the hypothesis, that poor language skills and auditory issues start at the toddler age and younger. The opportunity to intervene at such a youthful age and give these children extra help can make an enormous difference in their risk of not being able to overcome their issues with ADHD. Both studies finding concur that listening comprehension is particularly vulnerable in children with ADHD. “These findings strongly suggest that children diagnosed with ADHD are at risk for poor word reading and poor listening comprehension (Cain et al 2015). The study noted that the children at risk for developing ADHD had both parents and teachers complain that they could not grab the child’s attention or that the child seemed distant when they were being addressed by their family or teacher (Cain et …show more content…
The children were listening for either a dog and cat, cat and crow, or crow and dog, the child needed to press the correct button that corresponded to the matched sound they heard, there were task irrelevant sounds played at different intervals to analyze if the children reacted differently when interrupted. The reaction times were significantly slower with the boys with ADHD, along with more incorrect or omitted responses then the control group. The ADHD subject’s responses became more inaccurate as the experiment extended in time where the controls groups responses remained unchanged. When people with ADHD are distracted by sounds around them it takes them longer to get back on task. The studies score also showed that the children with ADHD had better outcomes when they were motivated or interested in the topics being discussed. ADHD subjects had a lower rate of retrieving textual information and in many instances used inaccurate information to form their responses. The ADHD students’ scores reflected a difference of up to twenty five percent more difficulty with tasks that demanded sustained