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.

该项目代表了一项长期的努力，以表征和量化学龄前和学龄儿童的听觉处理技能。 最近的研究结果表明，成人和儿童的听觉处理之间的许多差异可以追溯到中央，注意力因素的影响。 这些实验的目的是详细了解和描述这些核心因素对儿童在各种听觉任务中表现的影响。 这些任务测量儿童如何区分相关和不相关的信息，或听觉前景和听觉背景。特别感兴趣的是刺激不确定性的影响，例如在现实世界的听力情况下会发生的。 初步结果表明，儿童对不确定性比成人更敏感。 一组实验将使用强大的样本辨别范例，其中分析儿童在音调模式辨别范例中的反应，以产生关于模式中各种成分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将前景与背景分开，就像日常听力中所要求的那样，在教室等混响听力环境中将相关语音与不相关的竞争分开。 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。 这些实验的重点将是儿童对耳廓衍射提供的光谱线索的使用，以及儿童如何在耳廓生长时学习使用这些线索。 完善的虚拟听觉空间技术将用于合成和控制这些实验中的刺激。 整体研究设计的显著特点是，每个孩子都在实验的所有条件下重复测试，并且一般来说，测试程序是对常规用于评估成人听觉功能的严格范式的改编。 所有的实验最初都将涉及年龄在4到10岁之间的儿童，这些儿童正在正常发育，并且根据标准听力评估，他们的听力被判断为正常。