INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN AUDITORY ABILITIES

有一个迫切需要系统的研究的性质，范围，特别是在成人和儿童的听觉能力的个体差异的后果。 最近对复杂声音听觉的研究揭示了听觉能力的显著个体差异。 关于这些差异能力的重要性的假设已经影响了诊断实践，并且已经证明了用于矫正听觉感知缺陷的广泛销售的商业治疗系统是合理的。 要求支持800名纯音敏感度正常的成年听众的听觉能力的综合研究，并为正在进行的460名儿童在学校的前四个年级的跨学科研究（本顿-IU项目）的听觉部分。 对成年听众的研究将采用基本听觉能力测试（TBAC）的改进和扩展版本，加上一系列额外的语音和非语音任务。儿童研究是验光师，心理学家和儿童语言发展专家之间的合作，使用了流行病学/纵向研究中使用的最全面的感官，认知和语言能力测量。 初步研究的结果，保证这项研究将提供有效的和极具成本效益的答案的基本问题：什么是听觉能力的主要方面？言语感知、语言学习和阅读能力的缺陷会带来什么后果？ 如果通过该成套测试收集的数据证明有必要，将开发一个1小时的筛选测试，以识别具有显著听觉感知缺陷的儿童。 由于该项目肯定会识别出具有异常敏锐和异常差的听觉能力的听众亚组，因此将使用心理物理和生理测量进一步研究选定的听众亚组，包括额外的频谱和时间测试，扩展训练，早期，中期和晚期诱发反应，耳蜗发射和PET（可能还有功能磁共振成像）图像在听觉处理过程中获得。

There is an urgent need for a systematic study of the nature, range, and especially the consequences of individual differences in auditory abilities, in adults and children. Recent studies of the hearing of complex sounds have revealed as remarkable range of individual differences in auditory abilities. Assumptions about the significance of these differential abilities have influenced diagnostic practices and have justified widely marketed commercial therapy systems for the correction of auditory perceptual deficits. Support is requested for comprehensive studies of the auditory abilities of 800 adult listeners with normal pure-tone sensitivity, and for the auditory component of an ongoing cross-disciplinary study of 460 children in the first four grades of school (the Benton-IU Project). The research with adult listeners will employ an improved and extended version of the Test of Basic Auditory Capabilities (TBAC), plus a range of additional speech and nonspeech tasks. The research with children is a collaboration between optometrists, psychologists, and specialists in child language development, using the most comprehensive set of measures of sensory, cognitive, and linguistic abilities ever employed in an epidemiological/longitudinal study. Results of preliminary studies, assure that this research will provide valid and extremely cost-efficient answers to the basic questions: What are the major dimensions of auditory abilities?, and What are the consequences of deficits in those abilities for speech perception, language learning and reading? If warranted by the data collected with this test battery , a one-hour screening test will be developed to identify children with significant auditory perceptual deficits. Because the project is certain to identify subgroups of listeners with both unusually acute and unusually poor auditory abilities, selected subgroups of listeners will be further investigated using psychophysical and physiological measures, including additional spectral and temporal tests, extended training, early, middle and late evoked responses, cochlear emissions, and PET (and possibly FMRI) images obatined during auditory processing.