# HEARING ASSESSMENT IN PRESCHOOL AND SCHOOL-AGED CHILDREN

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON · 1994 · $111,694

## Abstract

This project represents the continuation of 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.  Published results from the previous funding
period 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; some children demonstrate
adult-like performance as early as age three.  Recent results suggest
that this variability may result from the fact that the performance of
some children is especially susceptible to the interference caused by
uncertainty and the presence of distractor stimuli.  Thus, it does not
appear necessary to assume that children have an underdeveloped auditory
system; some may simply use suboptimal listening strategies.  A major
goal of the current experiments is to understand and characterize in
detail the listening strategies used by children in a variety of auditory
tasks.  Of special interest is how children separate relevant from
irrelevant information, or auditory "foreground" from auditory
"background".  One set of experiments will use a simplified version of
the powerful sample-discrimination paradigm in which various aspects of a
child's performance in discriminating tone patterns are compared to the
performance of the optimal listener specified by information and
detection theory.  This paradigm produces 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 information to
separate 'foreground" from "background", for example to separate relevant
speech from irrelevant competition in a reverberant listening environment
such as a classroom.  These experiments will use discrimination tasks to
determine the distracting effects of single echoes, and simple
localization tasks to assess the ability of children to use the complex
spectral cues (provided by the pinnae) that must be learned.  All of the
experiments will initially involve children from three to eight years of
age who are developing typically, and whose hearing is judged to be
normal on the basis of standard audiometric assessment.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 2198833
- **Project number:** 5R01HD023333-06
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON
- **SAM.gov UEI:** LCLSJAGTNZQ7
- **Principal Investigator:** Frederic L Wightman
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 1994
- **Award amount:** $111,694
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 1989-04-01 → 1997-07-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/2198833

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 2198833, HEARING ASSESSMENT IN PRESCHOOL AND SCHOOL-AGED CHILDREN (5R01HD023333-06). Retrieved via MORVS 2026-10-25 from https://api.morvs.ai/grant/nih/2198833. Licensed CC0.

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