Perception of Everyday Sounds: A Developmental Study of a Free Sorting Task

Abstract

ObjectivesThe analysis of categorization of everyday sounds is a crucial aspect of the perception of our surrounding world. However, it constitutes a poorly explored domain in developmental studies. The aim of our study was to understand the nature and the logic of the construction of auditory cognitive categories for natural sounds during development. We have developed an original approach based on a free sorting task (FST). Indeed, categorization is fundamental for structuring the world and cognitive skills related to, without having any need of the use of language. Our project explored the ability of children to structure their acoustic world, and to investigate how such structuration matures during normal development. We hypothesized that age affects the listening strategy and the category decision, as well as the number and the content of individual categories.DesignEighty-two French children (6–9 years), 20 teenagers (12–13 years), and 24 young adults participated in the study. Perception and categorization of everyday sounds was assessed based on a FST composed of 18 different sounds belonging to three a priori categories: non-linguistic human vocalizations, environmental sounds, and musical instruments.ResultsChildren listened to the sounds more times than older participants, built significantly more classes than adults, and used a different strategy of classification. We can thus conclude that there is an age effect on how the participants accomplished the task. Analysis of the auditory categorization performed by 6-year-old children showed that this age constitutes a pivotal stage, in agreement with the progressive change from a non-logical reasoning based mainly on perceptive representations to the logical reasoning used by older children. In conclusion, our results suggest that the processing of auditory object categorization develops through different stages, while the intrinsic basis of the classification of sounds is already present in childhood.

Categorization of everyday sounds by cochlear implanted children

“…In order to further understand the ability of children with CIs to perceive everyday sounds, we adopted a free sorting task (FST) protocol 27,28 . There are several advantages to using the FST to test children with CIs, as it allows a set of natural stimuli to be studied in a single test without imposing specific performance levels.…”

A study of voice and non-voice processing in Prader-Willi syndrome

“…The additional load on high-order integrative functions was generated by requiring participants to establish the categorization criteria/principles for themselves. In an FST, participants may group items according to a variety of subjective criteria, but sounds are usually grouped according to their common semantic or acoustic properties [16,28,29]. We found that controls divided the sounds they heard into voice, instruments and environmental categories (i.e., categorization predominantly based on semantic information as a consequence of identifying the sources of the sounds).…”

“…This task provides an opportunity to test a large set of stimuli without having to divide them into dimensions beforehand, thus allowing participants to categorize them according to their own criteria/principles. The FST has been shown to be well-suited to evaluating auditory perception in adult participants, as well as in children as young as 6 years [16,28,29]. In an FST, participants group the objects according to their common semantic or acoustic properties.…”

“…In some cases, these results can be explained by the fact that the experimental protocol elicited the explicit use of social cognition mechanisms. When it comes to dissociating implicit from explicit mechanisms, a free sorting task (FST) constitutes a good alternative to 2FAC protocols, as it can even be performed by young children [16]. We developed an FST with different types of natural environmental sounds, including voice sounds.…”

Toward a Nonspeech Test of Auditory Cognition: Semantic Context Effects in Environmental Sound Identification in Adults of Varying Age and Hearing Abilities

“…Furthermore, when asked to categorize environmental sounds, adult listeners tended to group them based on semantic relationships that could either include abstract object properties or draw on meaningful activities the sounds represent in everyday life, e.g., ‘getting the groceries’ [34–36]. Semantic connections are formed among sounds that are likely to occur together, which results in the formation of a semantic memory network [33], also referred to as an auditory schema [3, 37].…”