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 i s to test the hypothesis that self-generated noise elevates detection thresholds in young listeners, particularly at low frequencies.
The second aim i s 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 i s 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.

Public Health Relevance

Behavioral data represent the gold standard for assessing hearing, but they are affected by many different factors (e.g., sensorineural encoding of sound, central/cognitive factors). At present we have very few techniques for differentiating these factors in infants and young children, which in turn undermines our ability to identify sensorineural hearing loss or to evaluate the maturation of central auditory processing. Basic and applied experiments are proposed to differentiate the factors responsible for immature auditory behavior, and to develop novel methods for the evaluation of particular functional hearing abilities.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
5R01DC014460-03
Application #
9248334
Study Section
Auditory System Study Section (AUD)
Program Officer
King, Kelly Anne
Project Start
2015-04-01
Project End
2020-03-31
Budget Start
2017-04-01
Budget End
2018-03-31
Support Year
3
Fiscal Year
2017
Total Cost
$290,700
Indirect Cost
$99,450
Name
University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
Department
Otolaryngology
Type
Schools of Medicine
DUNS #
608195277
City
Chapel Hill
State
NC
Country
United States
Zip Code
27599
Buss, Emily; Hodge, Sarah E; Calandruccio, Lauren et al. (2018) Masked Sentence Recognition in Children, Young Adults, and Older Adults: Age-Dependent Effects of Semantic Context and Masker Type. Ear Hear :
Rose, Jane; Flaherty, Mary; Browning, Jenna et al. (2018) Pure-Tone Frequency Discrimination in Preschoolers, Young School-Age Children, and Adults. J Speech Lang Hear Res 61:2440-2445
Buss, Emily; Flaherty, Mary M; Leibold, Lori J (2017) Development of frequency discrimination at 250?Hz is similar for tone and /ba/ stimuli. J Acoust Soc Am 142:EL150
Bonino, Angela Yarnell; Leibold, Lori J (2017) Behavioral Assessment of Hearing in 2 to 4 Year-old Children: A Two-interval, Observer-based Procedure Using Conditioned Play-based Responses. J Vis Exp :
Buss, Emily; Porter, Heather L; Leibold, Lori J et al. (2016) Effects of Self-Generated Noise on Estimates of Detection Threshold in Quiet for School-Age Children and Adults. Ear Hear 37:650-659
Buss, Emily; Leibold, Lori J; Hall 3rd, Joseph W (2016) Effect of response context and masker type on word recognition in school-age children and adults. J Acoust Soc Am 140:968