Factors influencing the behavioral assessment of hearing during infancy and childhood

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 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Behavioral assessment is the gold standard for characterizing hearing in infants and children, in both clinical and laboratory settings. Behaviora data play a critical role in the diagnosis and treatment of hearing loss, and they represent our most comprehensive source of information about the time-course of typical auditory development. Despite their practical and theoretical importance, the interpretation of behavioral data is complicated by the contribution of multiple factors, including sensorineural encoding of sound, central auditory processing, and cognitive factors specific to behavioral testing. Disentangling these factors is essential to accurately describing human auditory development, and to the diagnosis of hearing loss and accurate fitting of auditory prostheses during infancy and childhood. The long-term goal of this research is to identify the factors responsible for immature auditory behavior in infants and children, and to develop techniques for differentiating the contributions of these factors in individual listeners. This is accomplished with three specifi aims. The first aim is to test the hypothesis that self-generated noise elevates detection thresholds in young listeners, particularly at low frequencies. The second aim is to evaluate central auditory processing and general cognitive factors limiting performance of young listeners, including memory for pitch and loudness, the ability to listen selectively in frequency r time, and the ability to capitalize on the context present in a closed-set speech recognition task. The third aim is to evaluate novel procedures for improving behavioral assessment of hearing in infants, toddlers, and `hard-to-test' children with hearing loss. The proposed work is of theoretical and clinical significance, in that it examines how the various factors contributing to auditory behavior limit performance across age and within individuals. The results obtained are expected to advance assessment methodologies in clinical and basic science settings.