Brief-Tone Frequency Discrimination by Children

N, Thompson; Cranford, Jerry L.; Hoyer, Elmer A.

doi:10.1044/jslhr.4205.1061

Cited by 72 publications

(79 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…The discrimination thresholds measured in this study are noticeably higher than some reported in previous investigations with children (Thompson, Cranford, & Hoyer, 1999). However, results are not directly comparable because of the effects of practice.…”

Section: Comparison With Existing Datacontrasting

confidence: 80%

Poor frequency discrimination is related to oral language disorder in children: a psychoacoustic study

et al. 2005

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Some children have difficulty in perceiving differences between sounds, even though they have normal hearing sensitivity, and it has been suggested that such problems could lead to difficulties in language and literacy development. Poor ability to distinguish sounds on the basis of frequency (perceived as pitch) has been described in poor readers on a variety of auditory processing tasks. The aim of the present study was three-fold: to determine whether children with specific language impairment (SLI) have difficulty discriminating frequency, whether this deficit is specific to the frequency domain, or part of a more general auditory impairment, and whether it is linked to reading or oral language ability. The performance of a SLI group (N = 15) and a control group with normally developing oral language matched for age and intelligence (N = 18) was compared on a frequency discrimination task and a control task testing intensity discrimination. The children with SLI consistently demonstrated significantly poorer performance on the frequency discrimination task, but not on the intensity discrimination task. Frequency discrimination thresholds were not related to reading ability in either group. This study provides evidence for a basic auditory deficit in children with SLI, regardless of their reading ability.

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Section: Comparison With Existing Datacontrasting

confidence: 80%

Poor frequency discrimination is related to oral language disorder in children: a psychoacoustic study

et al. 2005

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“…Children's ability to discriminate frequency differences has also been extensively investigated (Maxon and Hochberg, 1982;Jensen and Neff, 1993;Cooper, 1994;Thompson et al, 1999). Overall the results suggest that young children have larger difference limens (DLs) than 8-yr-old (y.o.)…”

Section: A Pitch Perception In Childrenmentioning

confidence: 58%

Sensitivity of school-aged children to pitch-related cues

Deroche

Zion

Schurman

et al. 2012

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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Two experiments investigated the ability of 17 school-aged children to process purely temporal and spectro-temporal cues that signal changes in pitch. Percentage correct was measured for the discrimination of sinusoidal amplitude modulation rate (AMR) of broadband noise in experiment 1 and for the discrimination of fundamental frequency (F0) of broadband sine-phase harmonic complexes in experiment 2. The reference AMR was 100 Hz as was the reference F0. A child-friendly interface helped listeners to remain attentive to the task. Data were fitted using a maximum-likelihood technique that extracted threshold, slope, and lapse rate. All thresholds were subsequently standardized to a common d 0 value equal to 0.77. There were relatively large individual differences across listeners: eight had relatively adult-like thresholds in both tasks and nine had higher thresholds. However, these individual differences did not vary systematically with age, over the span of 6-16 yr. Thresholds were correlated across the two tasks and were about nine times finer for F0 discrimination than for AMR discrimination as has been previously observed in adults.

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“…Frequency discrimination of brief-duration tones (20 ms) reaches adult-like characteristics by the age of 7 years (Thompson et al, 1999) as does the ability to discriminate between spectrally overlapping sound sequences (Allen and Nelles, 1996). Therefore, if the segregation process was based solely upon the child's ability to discriminate between the frequencies of tones, then the 9-11-year-old group should have displayed similar results as adults.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 87%