Hearing in Childhood

1
Hearing in Childhood

• TLA SIN Due today
• Paperette due FRIDAY
• 915 AM in class (hard copy)
• Electronic copy must be emailed to Mike
• by 5 pm Friday

2
Fetal Audition

• Deafness screening
• Ultrasound probing
• Test at-risk vs. healthy
• Light/sound responsiveness
• Early warning (33 weeks of gestation)
• Early recognition
• Story reading in womb
• Infant prefers exposed story to novel
• Infant prefers mothers voice

3
Baby Hearing

• Auditory system
• Outer/middle/inner ear, brain stem, midbrain
• Small, but fully developed at birth
• Cortical development continues through first year
• Low frequency hearing (lt 10 kHz)
• Poor at birth
• Thresholds 2x adults
• Slow development (2-10 years)
• High frequency hearing (gt 10 kHz)
• Near adult levels at birth
• Improves to peak performance at 6 mos

4
Testing Babies

• Challenge of Baby research
• What is a response?
• Sucking rate
• Habituation paradigm
• Ad naseum exposure to a stimulus
• Change stimulus
• Dishabituation vs. habituation
• Bored baby wakes up?
• Sample challenges
• Loss of subjects

5
Localization in infants

• Can infants detect interaural differences?
• (loudness differences between the ears) (time
  difference between the ears)
• Recently born 10 minutes (Green, 1976)
• Orienting response to rattle
• Loudness, timing or both?
• Exp. 9 week old infants (Clifton et al., 1984)
• Loudness, timing combo of cues
• Predict which is better for infants?
• Both cues effective at 5 mos

6
Baby Cries (Dondi et al., 1999 Martin Clark,
1982)

• Newborn
• Exp presentation of own crying vs. other infant
  vs. similar noise event
• Predictions? Which causes the baby to cry the
  most?
• Noise event not as strong a reaction as baby
  crying
• Self-cry discrimination
• Sucking response greater to novel cry

7
The Mozart Effect (Rauscher et al., 1993
Thompson et al., 2001)

• Short-term improvement of spatial ability
• Children perform task with/without Mozart
• 10 15 minute improvement in performance
• EXP. Albinoni music vs. Silence vs. Mozart
• Predictions?
• Performance correlates with arousal
• Debunking Mozarts effect?
• Music training correlates with improved IQ
• Small, consistent effect
• Attendance and Small classes