| Sumario: | Introduction: The large number of auditory complaints that are not justified by the evaluation of the peripheral auditory system led scholars to seek explanations through procedures that evaluated the central auditory pathway. Thus, these complaints are now attributed to central auditory processing disorders (APD). However, studies in the area show that other disorders, such as reading and writing difficulties, may often appear associated with APD. In addition, the diagnosis of APD has been the subject of recent major discussions due to the large participation of cognitive processes in the behavioral assessment test battery. Objective: The aim of this study was to investigate behavioral and electrophysiological responses in children with reading and writing learning problems. Methods: This Study carries approval from the Research Ethics Committee of UNICAMP (2.041.609). The participants were divided into two groups based on their performance on reading and writing tasks. Children who had below average performances were included in a study group and the ones who had average or above average performance were included in the control group. Raven's Progressive Coloured Matrices method was applied to verify the intelligence level of all children. To be included in this study, all children have an average or above average (>percentil 26 or level III) intelligence level. This allows us to conclude that there is preservation of intellectual potential in all children. Participants totaled 54 children, with ages between 8 and 12, divided into two groups: a control group of 30 children and a study group of 24 children. All participants were submitted to evaluation of hearing with complete audiometry and high-frequency audiometry. Besides that, the following auditory processing tests were applied: Dichotic Digits (DD), Gaps in Noise (GIN), Synthetic Sentence Identification (SSI), Pitch Pattern Sequence (PPS), otoacoustic emissions, ABR, and P300 with tone burst stimuli. Results: No statistically significant differences were found in the evaluation of the peripheral auditory system. Behavioral results demonstrated that group comparisons showed differences for the DD, SSI GIN and PPS testes with control group performing better than the children with learning problems. No differences were observed for ABR responses. For P300 (tone burst) responses, the study group had significant longer latencies compared to the control group. Conclusions: Children with reading and writing problems performed poorly on standardized behavioral auditory processing tests and showed slower cognitive processing for tones.
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