HEARING ASSESSMENT IN PRESCHOOL AND SCHOOLAGED CHILDREN

学龄前儿童和学龄儿童的听力评估

• 批准号: 6641087
• 负责人: Frederic L Wightman
• 金额: $ 17.99万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF LOUISVILLE
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2003
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2003-07-01 至 2006-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/6641087
• 关键词: audiometry; auditory discrimination; auditory stimulus; child physical development; human subject; middle childhood (6-11); neural information processing; preschool child (1-5); psychoacoustics; sequential perception; stimulus /response

This project represents a long-term effort to characterize and quantify auditory processing skills in preschool and school-aged children. Recent results suggest that many of the reported differences between adult and child auditory processing can be traced to the influence of central, attentional factors. The aims of the proposed experiments are to understand and characterize in detail the influence of these central factors on a child s performance in a variety of auditory tasks. The tasks measure how children separate relevant from irrelevant information, or auditory foreground from auditory background . Of special interest is the impact of stimulus uncertainty, such as would occur in real-world listening situations. Preliminary results suggest that children are much more sensitive to uncertainty than are adults. One set of experiments will use the powerful sample-discrimination paradigm in which a child s responses in a tone pattern discrimination paradigm are analyzed to produce 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 cues to separate foreground from background , as required in everyday listening to separate relevant speech from irrelevant competition in a reverberant listening environment such as a classroom. A third set of experiments will address basic questions about how children process auditory spatial information. The focus in these experiments will be on children s use of the spectral cues provided by pinna diffraction, and how children might learn to use these cues while the pinnae are growing. Well established virtual auditory space techniques will be used to synthesize and control the stimuli in these experiments. The distinguishing features of the overall study design are that each child is tested repeatedly in all conditions of an experiment, and that in general the testing procedures are adaptations of the rigorous paradigms routinely used to assess adult auditory function. All of the experiments will initially involve children from four to ten years of age who are developing typically, and whose hearing is judged to be normal on the basis of standard audiometric assessment.

这个项目代表了一项长期的努力，以确定学龄前和学龄儿童的听觉处理技能的特征和数量。最近的研究结果表明，许多已报道的成人和儿童听觉处理的差异可以追溯到中枢注意因素的影响。这些实验的目的是为了详细了解和表征这些中心因素对儿童S在各种听觉任务中表现的影响。这些任务衡量儿童如何将相关信息与无关信息区分开来，或将听觉前景与听觉背景区分开来。特别令人感兴趣的是刺激不确定性的影响，比如在现实世界中倾听的情况下会发生的情况。初步结果显示，儿童对不确定性的敏感度比成年人高得多。一组实验将使用强大的样本-辨别范式，其中儿童S在声调模式辨别范式中的反应被分析，以产生关于模式中的各个组成部分是如何加权和组合的详细信息。第二组实验将测量儿童如何使用空间线索来区分前景和背景，这是在日常听力中，在有回声的听力环境(如教室)中将相关话语与无关竞争区分开来所需要的。第三组实验将解决有关儿童如何处理听觉空间信息的基本问题。这些实验的重点将放在儿童S对耳廓衍射提供的光谱线索的使用上，以及孩子们如何在羽片生长的过程中学习使用这些线索。在这些实验中，将使用成熟的虚拟听觉空间技术来合成和控制刺激。整个研究设计的显著特点是，每个孩子在实验的所有条件下都会被重复测试，而且一般来说，测试程序是对常规用于评估成人听觉功能的严格范式的适应。所有的实验最初将涉及四到十岁的儿童，他们的听力在标准听力评估的基础上被判断为正常。