DETERMINATION OF CORRELATIONS BETWEEN SUBJECTS’ PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGICAL PARAMETERS AND THE RESULTS OF THE PERCEPTUAL EXPERIMENT

"Nowadays in Russia, there are insufficient systematized data on the degree of preparedness of medical students and graduates to interact with children with atypical development (AD). We have developed a methodological approach to assess the interaction of medical students with AD children. The work uses a perceptual experiment during which students are presented with test sequences containing speech signals of children with typical development (TD) and AD (Down syndrome, autism spectrum disorders). During the perceptual experiment, the listeners’ behavior was being video-recorded in parallel to verify their answers using the FaceReader software determining the true emotional state by their facial expression. The students’ psycho-emotional status was evaluated using a battery of psychological tests before and after the perceptual experiment. Additionally, the subjects’ psychophysiological and physiological parameters were determined. At the first stage of the work, the speech of 16 TD and AD children (11 boys and 5 girls) was used, the listeners were 25 1st-year pediatric students and 5 experts in the field of child speech. The statistical analysis revealed correlations between the listeners’ psychophysiological characteristics (Russian-native speakers): the profile of functional lateral asymmetry, formation indicators of the phonemic hearing, the coefficient of lateral preference by speech and the success in recognizing the children’s gender, age, psychoneurological state (TD – developmental disorders), and the severity of disorders in AD children. The acoustic parameters of words classified by experts as “legible” and “illegible” were determined. The work is financially supported by the Russian Science Foundation (project 19–78–00057)."