Auditory Abilities in Children
This project represents an effort to characterize and quantify the development of auditory
processing skills
in preschool and school-aged children. There are two distinguishing features of this
effort. First, each child
is tested repeatedly in all conditions of an experiment producing precise estimates of both
between and
within subjects variability. Second, the psychophysical procedures are adaptations of the
rigorous forced-
choice paradigms routinely used to assess adult auditory function. This permits
meaningful comparisons of
adult and child performance. Our published results show that the average frequency
resolution, temporal
resolution, and spectral pattern discrimination skills of children do not reach adult levels
until age six or
later. However, variability in performance among children is much higher than among
adults. Our
experiments suggest that this variability may result from sub-optimal listening strategies
employed by
children. A major goal of current experiments is to understand and characterize in detail
these listening
strategies. We apply a simplified version of the sample-discrimination paradigm (Lutfi,
1989) in
which various aspects of a child's performance in discriminating tone patterns are
compared to the
performance of an ideal observer as specified by detection theory.
Selected Publications
Lutfi, R. A., and Wightman, F. L. (1995). Guessing or confusion?: Analytic predictions for two models of
target-distracter interference in children. Association for Research in Otolaryngology, 19th Midwinter
Meeting, Clearwater, Florida.* Willihnganz, M.S., Stellmack, M.A., Lutfi, R.A., and Wightman, F.L. (1996). Spectral weights in level
discrimination by preschool children: Synthetic listening conditions. Journal of the Acoustical Society of
America 101, 2803-2810. * Stellmack, M.A., Willihnganz, M.S., Wightman, F.L., and Lutfi, R.A. (1996). Spectral weights in level
discrimination by preschool children: Analytic listening conditions. Journal of the Acoustical Society of
America 101, 2811-2821.