HEARING ASSESSMENT IN PRESCHOOL AND SCHOOL-AGED CHILDREN

这个项目代表了对学龄前和学龄儿童的听觉处理技能进行表征和量化的长期努力。最近的研究结果表明，成人和儿童听觉处理之间的许多差异可以追溯到中心注意力因素的影响。本实验的目的是了解和详细描述这些中心因素对儿童在各种听觉任务中的表现的影响。这些任务衡量的是孩子们如何区分相关信息和无关信息，或者如何区分听觉前景和听觉背景。特别令人感兴趣的是刺激不确定性的影响，比如在真实的听力情况下会发生的影响。初步结果表明，儿童对不确定性比成人敏感得多。一组实验将使用强大的样本辨别范式，在该范式中，分析儿童在音调模式辨别范式中的反应，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来区分前景和背景，就像在教室等混响的听力环境中，在日常听力中区分相关的言语和不相关的竞争一样。第三组实验将解决关于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，以及儿童在耳廓生长过程中如何学会使用这些线索。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被反复测试，总的来说，测试程序是对常规用于评估成人听觉功能的严格范例的改编。所有的实验最初都将涉及4到10岁的儿童，这些儿童发育正常，根据标准听力评估，他们的听力被判断为正常。

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.