Infants five and seven months of age participated in two studies in which two filmed facial expressions were presented with a single vocal expression characteristic of one of the facial expressions. Seven- , but not five-month-olds, increased their fixation to a facial expression when it was sound-specified. Preferences for a particular expression…

Studies development of auditory temporal acuity in 56 children aged 6 to 12 years and in 8 adults. Improvement in temporal acuity with age was attributed to development of sensory processes and not to age-related changes in nonsensory factors. (Author/BE)

Comparison of the auditory frequency resolving ability of preschool children, school-aged children, and adults found data from children as young as three-years-old that were qualitatively indistinguishable from adult data though threshold estimates from young children were more variable from run to run than from adults. Increasing age improved…

This examination of the auditory perceptual abilities of 40 children, ages 4-10, and 10 adults found significant differences between the performances of the 4- to 8-year olds and of the adults. Acquisition of adultlike duration discrimination performance was demonstrated between the ages of 8 and 10 years. (Author/JDD)

Three experiments with young children and adults were performed to examine the development of frequency selectivity and to attempt to separate peripheral versus central contributions to frequency selectivity. Results suggested that the shallow notched-noise, fixed-masker-level functions of four-year-old children are probably a result of poor…

The study investigated (1) the reliability of children's (N=10 in grades 1, 3, and 5) judgments of vocal roughness, (2) normal-abnormal cut-off values for these judgments, and (3) children's ratings versus adult clinician ratings of the same samples. Results indicated child judgments commensurate with that of clinicians. (Author/DB)

The ability of 10 normal-speaking 5-year-olds and 10-normal-speaking 7-year-olds to categorize consonants as "dripping" (stop), "flowing" (fricative), "tongue" (lingual place of articulation), "or "lip" (labial place of articulation) was evaluated. Children's ability to categorize was evaluated as an indicator of their awareness of feature…

Forty-eight children, either with or without a sensorineural hearing loss and either young (6 and 7 years old) or older (9 and 10 years old) reproduced sequences of acoustic stimuli that varied in number, temporal spacing, and type. Results suggested that the poorer performance of the hearing-impaired children was due to auditory processing…

This study examined developmental effects in auditory perception of word-final /s/ in inflectional morpheme contexts as a function of high-frequency (HF) bandwidth with normal hearing 5-, 7-, 10-year-olds and adults. The higher detection thresholds and larger clarity rating variances for the youngest participants support the use of extended…

Eighty normally hearing children (ages 4 to 8) judged the clarity of sentences that were systematically bandpass-filtered to increase intelligibility. Study of 10 subjects at each age found that children 5 years or older were able to make reliable clarity judgements using paired comparisons or category rating; however, the method of paired…

This study evaluated the ability of 30 normally developing children (ages 6-12) to report the perceived location of a stationary fused auditory image (FAI) or track a "moving" FAI. Although subjects performed at normal adult levels with the stationary sound measure, they exhibited a significant age-related trend with the moving sound…

This study examined whether the perceptual weights of 40 children and adults with hearing loss differ from those of normal hearing counterparts. Results revealed child-adult differences in overall performance and also revealed an effect of hearing loss. However, the pattern of perceptual weights was similar across groups under most conditions.…

A 2-alternative forced-choice task was used to measure the ability of 18 children (ages 3 to 5) to detect varying levels of sinusoids in noise. Results showed that, on average, the children's thresholds were higher and the slopes of their psychometric functions were shallower than those of adults, though between-subjects variability was large.…

Earlier research (Thorson, et al., 1976) found that latencies increase for acoustically confusable letter pairs and decrease for visually confusable letter pairs as a positive function of interstimulus interval (ISI). To extend these findings to different age groups, 30 young adults (mean age, 21.4 years) and 30 older adults (mean age, 68.8 years)…

Both musical training and age were found to influence the ability of string students to discriminate tempo change. The musical variables of speed, style, and direction also affected tempo perception. However, the music variables explained less than one-third of the total variance. Tempo perception is an extremely complex phenomenon. (Author/RM)