Background: Listening difficulty (LiD) is the experience of struggling to understand speech, especially in noisy or complex listening environments, even when hearing thresholds are normal. Children with language deficits may experience LiD, resulting from interactions between auditory, cognitive, and language processing. The Evaluation of Children’s Listening and Processing Skills (ECLiPS) is a validated caregiver-report measure designed to identify and understand listening and processing skills. Developing listening profiles using the ECLiPS may provide a better understanding of children’s functional listening abilities and support more targeted diagnostic pathways.

Objectives: This study examines listening profiles of children with language development concerns (LDC) using the Flemish version of the ECLiPS (ECLiPS-FL). We hypothesize that these children primarily show weaknesses on the Language/Literacy/Laterality (L/L/L) scale, reflecting language-based roots of LiD. Additionally, we investigate associations between ECLiPS and standardized language tests, and whether language ability can be predicted from ECLiPS scores.

Methods: The study included 45 children aged 6-11 years (27 boys, 18 girls), referred for LDC, and 90 age-matched typically developing peers (57 boys, 33 girls). Children with hearing loss, intellectual disabilities, or limited language exposure were excluded. One caregiver for every child completed the ECLiPS-FL, providing composite scores on five subscales: Speech and Auditory Processing (SAP), Memory and Attention (M&A), Language/Literacy/Laterality (L/L/L), Pragmatic and Social Skills (PSS), and Environmental and Auditory Sensitivity (EAS). The children completed standardized language tests. For the current analyses, we focused on the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals – Fifth Edition (CELF-5), using the Core Language Score as a measure of overall language ability. Subsequent analyses examined group-level patterns and the association between ECLiPS and language scores.

Results: Compared to the reference data, children with LDC scored significantly lower across all ECLiPS subscales, with the lowest scores and the largest deviation from the normative group on the L/L/L scale. Despite this, the M&A scale was the strongest predictor of language performance on the CELF-5.

Conclusions: LiD are common in children with LDC, and mainly related to their language difficulties, as reported by caregivers. Quantitatively, scores on the M&A scale are most predictive of language ability as measured with the CELF-5. These findings point to a discrepancy: caregivers tend to notice overt language difficulties, while underlying mechanisms of LDC may primarily reflect cognitive factors related to memory and attention.