Factors influencing the behavioral assessment of hearing during infancy and childhood

 描述(由申请人提供)：在临床和实验室环境中，行为评估是描述婴儿和儿童听力的黄金标准。Behaviora数据在听力损失的诊断和治疗中发挥着关键作用，它们代表了我们关于典型听觉发育时间进程的最全面的信息来源。尽管它们在实践和理论上都很重要，但行为数据的解释由于多种因素的作用而变得复杂，包括声音的感觉神经编码、中枢听觉处理和特定于行为测试的认知因素。这些因素的分离对于准确描述人类听觉发育、诊断听力损失和准确装配婴幼儿和儿童时期的听力假体是必不可少的。这项研究的长期目标是确定导致婴儿和儿童不成熟听觉行为的因素，并开发技术来区分这些因素在单个听者中的作用。这是通过三个具体目标来实现的。第一个目标是验证这样一种假设，即自我产生的噪音会提高年轻听众的检测阈值，特别是在低频率下。第二个目标是评估中央听觉处理和限制年轻听者表现的一般认知因素，包括对音调和响度的记忆，选择性地在频率和时间上听的能力，以及在封闭的语音识别任务中利用上下文的能力。 第三个目标是评估改善听力损失婴儿、学步儿童和“难以测试”儿童听力行为评估的新方法。这项拟议的工作具有理论和临床意义，因为它研究了导致听觉行为的各种因素如何限制不同年龄和个人的表现。所获得的结果有望推进临床和基础科学环境中的评估方法。

 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.