Universal Journal of Psychology 9(1): 1-7, 2021 http://www.hrpub.org DOI: 10.13189/ujp.2021.090101 The Effect of Auditory Distraction on the Auditory Word Repetition Performance of Children with ADHD Mohammed Shafiullah 1,* , Shaira Berg 1 , Paul van Schaik 2 , Lorraine McDonald 3 , John D. Allbutt 4 1 Department of Organisational Psychology, St. Gallen University, St. Gallen 9000, Switzerland 2 Centre for Applied Psychological Sciences, University of Teeside, TS1 3BA, United Kingdom 3 School of Social Science, Humanities and Law, Teesside University, United Kingdom 4 Centre of Health Sciences Research, University of Salford, United Kingdom Received January 21, 2021; Revised March 27, 2021; Accepted April 18, 2021 Cite This Paper in the following Citation Styles (a): [1] Mohammed Shafiullah, Shaira Berg, Paul van Schaik, Lorraine McDonald, John D. Allbutt , "The Effect of Auditory Distraction on the Auditory Word Repetition Performance of Children with ADHD," Universal Journal of Psychology, Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 1 - 7, 2021. DOI: 10.13189/ujp.2021.090101. (b): Mohammed Shafiullah, Shaira Berg, Paul van Schaik, Lorraine McDonald, John D. Allbutt (2021). The Effect of Auditory Distraction on the Auditory Word Repetition Performance of Children with ADHD. Universal Journal of Psychology, 9(1), 1 - 7. DOI: 10.13189/ujp.2021.090101. Copyright©2021 by authors, all rights reserved. Authors agree that this article remains permanently open access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International License Abstract Educators have observed and suggested that an appropriate seating arrangement is vital for the classroom performance of children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (CADHD). The current study attempts to find a cognitive reason for this observation by exploring whether CADHD are distracted by classroom noises from different locations. The current study attempts to create an experimental setting, which is on the one hand intuitively related to the classroom situation, while also maintaining experimental control, exploring the causal relation and using a task which does not require excessive attentional resources to focus on the impact of distracters rather than on task difficulty. We explored whether CADHD are more vulnerable to auditory distracters from different locations even if an attended task does not demand excessive executive resources. CADHD and normal children verbally repeated auditorily presented familiar words. Auditorily presented random numbers from the front, left, or right of the participants were presented randomly as distracters. The results showed that the effect of distracter on error rate was significant as was the interaction effect of distracter and group. However, only distracters from the front led to significantly more errors for CADHD. The findings suggest that CADHD are vulnerable to distracters from the auditory modality even when they have to perform a simple auditory task such as repeating familiar words – in a situation intuitively akin to the classroom setting. Keywords ADHD, Attention, Auditory Distraction 1. Introduction Educators have stressed the importance of classroom seating arrangements for improving the performance of children with ADHD (CADHD). For instance, Carbone [1] suggested that CADHD should be seated at the front row to minimise distractions from other children. The distracters could be visual such as stationary items of other pupils, design or colour of the clothing, etc., and it could also be auditory such as other pupils chatting and whispering, the noise of turning pages, etc. Experimental studies have consistently demonstrated that CADHD are worse than normal control groups on neurological tests assessing sustained attention (e.g. [2], [3]). It has also been demonstrated that CADHD are highly distractible by visual distracters when they have to sustain their attention to perform a specific task ([4], [5]). On the other hand, cognitive research on auditory distracters is inconclusive ([6]). Reference [7] found effect of novel sounds as distracters, which slowed down attended visual tasks. However, Bedi, Halperin and Sharma [8] examined the normal population and reported that auditory distracters did not significantly correlate to sustained attention scores.