HEARING ASSESSMENT IN PRESCHOOL AND SCHOOL-AGED CHILDREN

该项目代表了一项持续的努力，以确定和 量化学龄前和学龄前儿童听觉处理技能的发展 学龄儿童。这有两个明显的特点 努力。首先，每个孩子都要在所有条件下重复测试 实验产生对中间和内部的精确估计 受试者的可变性。第二，心理物理程序是 对常规使用的严格强迫选择范式的适应 评估成人的听觉功能。这允许进行有意义的比较 成人和儿童表演。上一次资助的公布结果 周期显示平均频率分辨率、时间分辨率、 儿童的光谱模式辨别技能不能达到成人水平 水平直到六岁或更高。然而，性能的可变性在 儿童的比例比成年人高得多；一些儿童表现出 早在三岁的时候就表现得像成年人一样。最近的结果表明 这种差异可能是由于这样一个事实，即 有些孩子特别容易受到 不确定性和分心刺激的存在。因此，它不会 似乎有必要假设儿童的听觉发育不全 有些人可能只是使用不太理想的倾听策略。一位少校 当前实验的目标是理解和表征 详细介绍了儿童在各种听力模式下使用的听力策略 任务。特别令人感兴趣的是分开的儿童如何与 不相关的信息，或来自听觉的听觉“前景” “背景”。其中一组实验将使用简化版本的 强大的样本-歧视范例，其中 儿童在辨别声调模式方面的表现与 由信息和信息指定的最佳监听器的性能 探测理论。这一范例产生了关于如何 对阵列中的各种组件进行加权和组合。第二盘 将测量儿童如何使用空间信息来 将“前景”与“背景”分开，例如将相关的 在混响的聆听环境中来自无关竞争的演讲 比如一间教室。这些实验将使用辨别任务来 确定单个回声的分心效果，并简单 本地化任务评估儿童使用建筑群的能力 必须学习的光谱线索(由羽片提供)。所有的 实验最初将涉及3至8岁的儿童 发育典型的年龄，听力被判断为 在标准听力评估的基础上正常。

This project represents the continuation of an effort to characterize and quantify the development of auditory processing skills in preschool and school-aged children. There are two distinguishing features of this effort. First, each child is tested repeatedly in all conditions of an experiment producing precise estimates of both between and within subjects variability. Second, the psychophysical procedures are adaptations of the rigorous forced-choice paradigms routinely used to assess adult auditory function. This permits meaningful comparisons of adult and child performance. Published results from the previous funding period show that the average frequency resolution, temporal resolution, and spectral pattern discrimination skills of children do not reach adult levels until age six or later. However, variability in performance among children is much higher than among adults; some children demonstrate adult-like performance as early as age three. Recent results suggest that this variability may result from the fact that the performance of some children is especially susceptible to the interference caused by uncertainty and the presence of distractor stimuli. Thus, it does not appear necessary to assume that children have an underdeveloped auditory system; some may simply use suboptimal listening strategies. A major goal of the current experiments is to understand and characterize in detail the listening strategies used by children in a variety of auditory tasks. Of special interest is how children separate relevant from irrelevant information, or auditory "foreground" from auditory "background". One set of experiments will use a simplified version of the powerful sample-discrimination paradigm in which various aspects of a child's performance in discriminating tone patterns are compared to the performance of the optimal listener specified by information and detection theory. This paradigm produces detailed information on how the various components in a pattern are weighted and combined. A second set of experiments will measure how children use spatial information to separate 'foreground" from "background", for example to separate relevant speech from irrelevant competition in a reverberant listening environment such as a classroom. These experiments will use discrimination tasks to determine the distracting effects of single echoes, and simple localization tasks to assess the ability of children to use the complex spectral cues (provided by the pinnae) that must be learned. All of the experiments will initially involve children from three to eight years of age who are developing typically, and whose hearing is judged to be normal on the basis of standard audiometric assessment.