INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN AUDITORY ABILITIES

迫切需要对成人和儿童听觉能力个体差异的性质、范围，特别是后果进行系统的研究。最近对复杂声音听力的研究表明，听觉能力存在显著的个体差异。关于这些不同能力的重要性的假设已经影响了诊断实践，并证明了广泛销售的用于纠正听觉知觉缺陷的商业治疗系统的合理性。要求支持对800名具有正常纯音敏感性的成年听者的听力能力进行全面研究，并支持正在进行的一项对460名学龄前四年级儿童进行的跨学科研究的听觉部分(Benton-IU项目)。这项针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，以及一系列额外的言语和非言语任务。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/纵向研究中所使用的最全面的一套感知、认知和语言能力测量方法。初步研究的结果保证，这项研究将为以下基本问题提供有效和极具成本效益的答案：听觉能力的主要维度是什么？以及这些能力在言语感知、语言学习和阅读方面的缺陷会产生什么后果？如果测试电池收集的数据有根据，将开发一小时的筛查测试，以确定有严重听觉知觉缺陷的儿童。由于该项目肯定会识别出听力异常敏锐和异常差的听者亚群，因此将使用心理物理和生理测量对选定的听者亚群进行进一步调查，包括额外的光谱和时间测试、延长训练、早期、中期和晚期诱发反应、耳蜗发射以及在听觉处理过程中获得的PET(可能还有功能磁共振成像)图像。

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.