Background: 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. 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. 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. 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.

Methods: We tested whether children (6–16 years) with an over-responsive SPD phenotype (N = 12) integrated multisensory speech differently from age-matched typically-developing controls (TD: N = 12). Participants identified monosyllabic words while background noise level and sensory modality (auditory-alone, visual-alone, audiovisual) were varied in pseudorandom order. Improved word identification when speech was both seen and heard compared to when it was simply heard served to index multisensory speech integration.

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. In contrast, auditory-alone performance did not differ between the groups, signifying that this multisensory deficit is not simply due to impaired processing of auditory speech.

Conclusions: Children with an over-responsive SPD show a substantial reduction in their ability to benefit from complementary audiovisual speech, to enhance speech perception in a noisy environment. This has clear implications for performance in the classroom and other learning environments. Impaired multisensory integration may contribute to sensory over-reactivity that is the definitional of SPD.

背景：有一群儿童和成人在经历被认为适度且可控制的感官输入水平时表现出异常高度的不适。也就是说，他们在面对完全典型的声音、光、触觉、味觉或气味输入时表现出过度反应，并且这种情况的发生程度会干扰他们的日常功能并达到临床功能障碍水平。使这些人与众不同的是，这种感觉加工障碍 (SPD) 是在没有其他症状群的情况下观察到的，这些症状群会导致自闭症、多动症或其他通常与感觉加工困难相关的神经发育障碍的诊断。为解释这些 SPD 而提出的一项主要理论认为多感官整合存在缺陷，

方法：我们测试了儿童（6-16 岁）是否具有过度反应的 SPD 表型（否= 12) 集成的多感官语音不同于年龄匹配的典型开发控件 (TD:否= 12). 参与者识别单音节词，而背景噪音水平和感官模式（仅听觉、仅视觉、视听）以伪随机顺序变化。与仅听到语音时相比，同时看到和听到语音时改进的单词识别有助于索引多感官语音整合。

结果：患有 SPD 的学龄儿童在嘈杂的环境条件下无法从看到和听到的语音输入的组合中获益，这表明这些儿童从多感官综合处理中受益的程度与他们正常发育的程度不同同行。相比之下，单独的听觉表现在两组之间没有差异，这表明这种多感官缺陷不仅仅是由于听觉语言处理受损所致。

结论：具有过度反应 SPD 的儿童在嘈杂环境中从互补视听语音中获益的能力显着降低，以增强语音感知。这对课堂和其他学习环境中的表现有明显的影响。受损的多感觉整合可能导致感觉过度反应，这是 SPD 的定义。