Spectral weights in level discrimination by preschool children: Analytic listening conditions

Abstract

In this series of experiments, adult and child listeners were required to attend to a target tone in the presence of two distracters and to indicate in which of two intervals the target tone had the higher level. The attentional weight listeners placed on each component was estimated by computing the correlation between the level change of each component across intervals and the listener's response. In the first experiment, weights were obtained as a function of the mean level of the distracters (250 and 4000 Hz) for a 1000-Hz target. No consistent differences between the weighting functions of children and adults were observed. In a second experiment, weights were obtained as a function of the harmonic relationship between the distracters (250 and 4000 Hz, or 270 and 4320 Hz) and the 1000-Hz target. No difference was observed between the weighting functions computed with harmonic and inharmonic complexes. In the final experiment, each component of the complex (250, 1000, and 4000 Hz) was identified as the target in separate blocks of trials. In general, adults were able to weight the target component appropriately regardless of its frequency, while children tended to weight all components equally. The results suggest that preschool listeners may exhibit poorer attentional selectivity than adults.

Informational masking of speech in children: Effects of ipsilateral and contralateral distracters

“…Even in these simple tasks, children up to the ages of 6 to 7 years perform more poorly than adults ͑Allen, 1991; Allen and Nelles, 1996;Wightman, 1992, 1995;Allen et al, 1989;Bargones and Werner, 1994;Bargones, Werner, and Marean, 1995;Schneider et al, 1989;Stellmack et al, 1997;Wightman and Allen, 1992;Willihnganz et al, 1997͒. However, simple tone detection paradigms do not present the kind of source segregation challenge that we face in real life, primarily because the "distraction" is typically relatively static and has a very different quality than the target signal.…”

Across-channel interference in intensity discrimination: The role of practice and listening strategy

“…The paradigm used here shares some features with COSS analysis (Berg, 1989), where weights describing the combination of information are derived based on the relationship between random variability in some aspect of the stimulus and the probability of a signal-present response. This general approach has been used in previous studies of informational masking (Doherty & Lutfi, 1999;Neff & Odgaard, 2004;Stellmack, Willihnganz, Wightman et al, 1997). The model underlying the COSS analysis assumes that independent information is combined linearly across weighted channels.…”

“…Introducing a masker level rove in this paradigm has little or no additional effect on pure tone detection threshold provided those maskers are sufficiently remote from the signal frequency to minimize energetic masking (Neff & Callaghan, 1988;Oh & Lutfi, 1998). Masker level uncertainty is associated with substantial informational masking for masked intensity discrimination, however (Buss, 2007;Doherty & Lutfi, 1999;Fantini & Moore, 1994;Stellmack, Willihnganz, Wightman et al, 1997). For example, a recent study by Buss (2007) showed that intensity discrimination threshold of a 50-dB SPL standard tone at 948.7 Hz was elevated by approximately 10 dB (10log(ΔI/I)) with the inclusion of masker tones at 300 and 3000 Hz, roved in level on each interval (50 dB SPL ±8 dB).…”

Frequency discrimination in children: Perception, learning and attention

“…These properties include the slope of the function (Allen and Wightman, 1994) and the extent to which performance at high stimulus levels falls short of perfection (Bargones et al, 1995). In more recent work, auditory spectral distractors (Stellmack et al, 1997;Oh et al, 2001) and informational masking approaches (Wightman and Kistler, 2005) have been used to show immature selective attention in children. Generic, non-psychoacoustic measures of attention, such as the TEA-Ch (Manly et al, 2001), have also revealed immature auditory attention in subtests aimed at specific attentional functions (e.g.…”