HEARING ASSESSMENT IN PRESCHOOL AND SCHOOL-AGED CHILDREN

该项目代表了继续努力， 量化学前儿童听觉处理技能的发展， 学龄儿童。 这有两个显著的特点 努力 首先，每个孩子都要在一个 实验产生精确的估计， 受试者的变异性。 第二，心理物理程序是 严格的强迫选择范式的适应， 评估成年人的听觉功能 这使得有意义的比较， 成人和儿童的表演。 上一次融资的结果 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能力达不到成人 直到六岁或更晚。 然而，在性能的变化， 儿童比成人高得多;有些儿童表现出 像成年人一样的表现。 最近的结果表明， 这种变化可能是由于这样一个事实，即性能的 有些孩子特别容易受到 不确定性和干扰刺激的存在。 因此，它不 似乎有必要假设儿童有一个不发达的听觉 有些人可能只是使用次优的倾听策略。 一个主要 当前实验的目标是了解和表征 详细介绍了儿童在各种听觉中使用的听力策略 任务 特别感兴趣的是孩子们如何将相关的 不相关的信息，或听觉“前景”从听觉 “背景”。 一组实验将使用简化版本的 强有力的样本辨别范例， 儿童辨别声调模式的表现与 由信息指定的最佳监听器的性能， 检测理论 这个范例产生了关于 对图案中的各种分量进行加权和组合。 第二组 的实验将衡量儿童如何使用空间信息， 将“前景”与“背景”分开，例如将相关的 混响环境中来自无关竞争的语音 例如教室。 这些实验将使用辨别任务， 确定单个回声的分散注意力的效果， 本地化任务，以评估儿童的能力，使用复杂的 必须学习的光谱线索（由频闪仪提供）。 所有 实验最初将涉及三到八岁的儿童， 年龄是典型的发展，其听力被判断为 根据标准听力评估正常。

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.