Age differences in discrimination of simulated single-formant frequency transitions

Elliott, Lois L.; Hammer, Michael A.; Scholl, Margo E.; Wasowicz, Jan

doi:10.3758/bf03204981

Cited by 31 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…For example, it is known that children and adults perform differently on perceptual speech identification tasks such as making decisions about voice-onset time, vocalic length and duration, formant transitional periods, and segmental context (Elliott et al, 1986(Elliott et al, , 1989Nittrouer, 1996;Turk, 2004, 2005). Furthermore, it has been suggested that children's perceptual weighting strategies for speech-relevant acoustic properties change as they gain experience with a native language (Nittrouer and Crowther, 1998), and that the development of metaphonemic awareness may play some role in changes in cue weighting (Mayo et al, 2003).…”

Section: Mechanisms For Plasticitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Developmental Plasticity in the Human Auditory Brainstem

Johnson¹,

Nicol²,

Zecker³

et al. 2008

J. Neurosci.

147

126

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Development of the human auditory brainstem is thought to be primarily complete by the age of ϳ2 years, such that subsequent sensory plasticity is confined primarily to the cortex. However, recent findings have revealed experience-dependent developmental plasticity in the mammalian auditory brainstem in an animal model. It is not known whether the human system demonstrates similar changes and whether experience with sounds composed of acoustic elements relevant to speech may alter brainstem response characteristics. We recorded brainstem responses evoked by both click and speech syllables in children between the ages of 3 and 12 years. Here, we report a neural response discrepancy in brainstem encoding of these two sounds, observed in 3-to 4-year-old children but not in school-age children. Whereas all children exhibited identical neural activity to a click, 3-to 4-year-old children displayed delayed and less synchronous onset and sustained neural response activity when elicited by speech compared with 5-to 12-year-olds. These results suggest that the human auditory system exhibits developmental plasticity, in both frequency and time domains, for sounds that are composed of acoustic elements relevant to speech. The findings are interpreted within the contexts of stimulus-related differences and experience-dependent plasticity.

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Section: Mechanisms For Plasticitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Developmental Plasticity in the Human Auditory Brainstem

Johnson¹,

Nicol²,

Zecker³

et al. 2008

J. Neurosci.

147

126

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…First, as has been suggested in the visual attention literature (20), the difference might be due to better perceptual abilities in the older than in the younger children. Improved performance on auditory sensitivity and auditory discrimination tasks continues through childhood (94)(95)(96)(97). Researchers disagree about how much of this developmental change is due to sensory/perceptual factors and how much is due to changes in nonsensory factors, such as attention (98).…”

Section: Selective Attention In Childrenmentioning

confidence: 99%

The development of auditory attention in children

et al. 2000

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In this paper we review the development of four components of auditory attention: arousal, orienting, selective attention and sustained attention. We focus especially on the processes responsible for the selection of specific stimuli for further processing because these are essential for learning and development. Although much work still needs to be done, there is evidence of developmental change in some of the components of attention, especially early in infancy. Later developmental improvements seem to be primarily attributable to higher cognitive processes, such as motivation, strategy development and implementation, and voluntary direction and regulation of attention. INTRODUCTIONAttention is important for most, if not all, information processing. Attentional processes are involved in determining which internal and external stimuli are singled out for further processing and, consequently, which stimuli warrant a response. This process of selecting stimuli from an extremely complex, ever changing, multisensory environment is determined not only by the physical characteristics of the stimuli themselves, but also by the individual interests, motives, and cognitive strategies of the person perceiving the stimuli. Because attention is involved in the process of selection, it plays an important role in the establishment of flexible, adaptive behavior. The distribution of attention is critical for learning and development. Identifying and attending to the important aspects of the environment are essential for the acquisition of new skills. For example, investigators have shown that infants attend to the stress patterns of language and have argued that this facilitates language acquisition (1). The selection of stimuli for further processing also has implications for what information is stored in memory and the level of detail associated with particular memory traces.Central to our conception of attention are the processes responsible for the selection of specific stimuli for further processing. This selection can be automatic, as in the orienting elicited by a novel stimulus, or active, as in the search for a designated target in a set of stimuli during a selective attention task. In addition to selection, individuals must be alert (or exhibit at least some minimal level of arousal) and must be able to sustain an attentional focus for effective information processing and optimal learning. These four components of attention: arousal, orienting, selective attention, and sustained attention, are important to most models of attention (for example, 2-5) and will be used to organize our discussion of the development of attention.Attention has been studied extensively in infants and adults, as evidenced by the number of recent books on the subject (for example, 2, 5-12). However, attention

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“…Although children implanted early clearly can benefit from their CIs (Gilley et al, 2008;Sharma et al, 2005;Tajudeen et al, 2010), the processing strategies used with such children are based on our knowledge gained from adults. A long history of research in developmental auditory perception demonstrates that infants and children are not merely small adults-they attend to different aspects of the signal and process sound differently than do older listeners (see, for example, Elliott et al, 1989;Nittrouer, 1992Nittrouer, , 1996Polka et al, 2008;Werker and Tees, 1984;Werner and Bargones, 1992). It is likely, then, that the same would hold for CI users and for spectrally degraded speech.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Toddlers' recognition of noise-vocoded speech

Newman

Chatterjee

2013

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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Despite their remarkable clinical success, cochlear-implant listeners today still receive spectrally degraded information. Much research has examined normally hearing adult listeners' ability to interpret spectrally degraded signals, primarily using noise-vocoded speech to simulate cochlear implant processing. Far less research has explored infants' and toddlers' ability to interpret spectrally degraded signals, despite the fact that children in this age range are frequently implanted. This study examines 27-month-old typically developing toddlers' recognition of noise-vocoded speech in a language-guided looking study. Children saw two images on each trial and heard a voice instructing them to look at one item ("Find the cat!"). Full-spectrum sentences or their noise-vocoded versions were presented with varying numbers of spectral channels. Toddlers showed equivalent proportions of looking to the target object with full-speech and 24-or 8-channel noise-vocoded speech; they failed to look appropriately with 2-channel noise-vocoded speech and showed variable performance with 4-channel noise-vocoded speech. Despite accurate looking performance for speech with at least eight channels, children were slower to respond appropriately as the number of channels decreased. These results indicate that 2-yr-olds have developed the ability to interpret vocoded speech, even without practice, but that doing so requires additional processing. These findings have important implications for pediatric cochlear implantation.

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Age differences in discrimination of simulated single-formant frequency transitions

Cited by 31 publications

References 27 publications

Developmental Plasticity in the Human Auditory Brainstem

Developmental Plasticity in the Human Auditory Brainstem

The development of auditory attention in children

Toddlers' recognition of noise-vocoded speech

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