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.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development (NICHD)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
2R01HD023333-09
Application #
2904428
Study Section
Special Emphasis Panel (ZRG1-IFCN-6 (01))
Program Officer
Oster-Granite, Mary Lou
Project Start
1989-04-01
Project End
2004-08-31
Budget Start
1999-09-30
Budget End
2000-08-31
Support Year
9
Fiscal Year
1999
Total Cost
Indirect Cost
Name
University of Wisconsin Madison
Department
Pediatrics
Type
Other Domestic Higher Education
DUNS #
161202122
City
Madison
State
WI
Country
United States
Zip Code
53715
Rothpletz, Ann M; Wightman, Frederic L; Kistler, Doris J (2012) Informational masking and spatial hearing in listeners with and without unilateral hearing loss. J Speech Lang Hear Res 55:511-31
Rothpletz, Ann M; Wightman, Frederic L; Kistler, Doris J (2012) Self-monitoring of listening abilities in normal-hearing children, normal-hearing adults, and children with cochlear implants. J Am Acad Audiol 23:206-21
Wightman, Frederic L; Kistler, Doris J; O'Bryan, Amanda (2010) Individual differences and age effects in a dichotic informational masking paradigm. J Acoust Soc Am 128:270-9
Ives, D Timothy; Vestergaard, Martin D; Kistler, Doris J et al. (2010) Location and acoustic scale cues in concurrent speech recognition. J Acoust Soc Am 127:3729-37
Watson, Charles S; Miller, James D; Kewley-Port, Diane et al. (2008) Training listeners to identify the sounds of speech: I. A review of past studies. Hear J 61:26
Miller, James D; Watson, Charles S; Kistler, Doris J et al. (2008) Preliminary evaluation of the speech perception assessment and training system (SPATS) with hearing-aid and cochlear-implant users. Proc Meet Acoust 2:1-9
Miller, James D; Watson, Charles S; Kistler, Doris J et al. (2008) Training listeners to identify the sounds of speech: II. Using SPATS software. Hear J 61:29-33
Wightman, Frederic; Kistler, Doris; Brungart, Douglas (2006) Informational masking of speech in children: auditory-visual integration. J Acoust Soc Am 119:3940-9
Wightman, Frederic L; Kistler, Doris J (2005) Informational masking of speech in children: effects of ipsilateral and contralateral distracters. J Acoust Soc Am 118:3164-76
Wightman, Frederic L; Callahan, Michael R; Lutfi, Robert A et al. (2003) Children's detection of pure-tone signals: informational masking with contralateral maskers. J Acoust Soc Am 113:3297-305

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