Developmental Psychoacoustics (Apa Science Volumes)

360 Pages·1992·19.58 MB·English

by  Lynne A. Werner

Elited IIJ lynie A. Werner a i l E dwii W RuBel
American Psychological Association Washington, DC
Contents
List of Contributors ix
Preface xi
Part One: Developmental Psychoacoustics:
Current Progress
1 Sources of Developmental Change in Auditory Sensitivity 3
Bruce A. Schneider and Sandra E. Trehub
2 Interpreting Developmental Psychoacoustics 47
Lynne A. Werner
3 Interactions Between Sensory and Nonsensory Factors in the Responses
of Newborn Birds to Sound 89
Lincoln Gray
4 Individual Differences in Auditory Capability Among Preschool Children 113
Frederic Wightman and Prudence Allen
5 The Development of Spatial Hearing in Human Infants 135
Rachel K. Clqton
6 Infants' Perception of Low Pitch 159
Marsha G. Clarkson
Part Two: Interpretative Issues in Developmental
Psychoacoustics
7 Issues in Infant Psychoacoustics 191
Neal F. Viemister and Robert S. Schlauch
vii
CONTENTS
8 Statistical Properties of 500-Trial Infant Psychometric Functions 211
Davida Y. Teller, Corinne Mar, and Karen L. Preston
9 Optics, Receptors, and Spatial Vision in Human Infants 229
Martin S. Banks
Part Three: Developmental Psychoacoustics the Context
in
of Hearing Science
10 The Refinement of Auditory Form and Function During Development 257
Dan H. Sanes
11 Developmental Considerations in Binaural Hearing Experiments 281
Constantine Trahwtis
12 Psychoacoustics and Speech Perception: Internal Standards, Perceptual
Anchors, and Prototypes 293
Patricia K. Kuhl
13 Bridging the Gap Between Developmental Psychoacoustics and Pediatric
Audiology 333
Arlene Earley Carney
Index 35 1
About the Editors 363
viii
Contributors
Prudence Allen, Department of Communication Disorders, University of West-
ern Ontario
S. Banks, School of Optometry, University of California, Berkeley
Martin
Arlene Earley Carney, Boys Town National Institute, Omaha, NE
G. Clarkmn, Department of Psychology, Georgia State University
Marsha
Rachel K. Clifton, Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts
Lincoln Gray, Department of Otolaryngology, University of Texas Medical
School, Houston
Patricia K. Kuhl, Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, University of
Washington
Corinne Department of Psychology, Ohio State University
Mar,
Karen L. Preston, Department of Psychology, University of Washington
Dan H. Sanes, Center for Neuroscience, New York University
Robert S. Schlauch, Department of Communication Disorders, University of
Minnesota
Bruce A. Schneider, Center for.Research in Human Development, University
of Toronto
Davida Y. Teller, Department of Psychology, University of Washington
Constantine Trahiotis, Department of Otolaryngology, University of Connecti-
cut Health Center
Sandra E. Trehub, Center for Research in Human Development, University of
Toronto
Neal Viemeister, Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota
E
Lynne A. Werner, Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, University of
Washington
Frederic Wightman, Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-
Madison
ix
Preface
W
hy do things appear as they do? The nature of perception has been an
important issue since the time of Aristotle, and as long as the question
has been asked, the development of perception has been at the crux of the mat-
ter. Is it the innate properties of the nervous system or the learned associations
between sensory cues and physical events that form the bases of perception?
Long before anyone thought to observe infants and children directly, philoso-
phers, physiologists, and psychologists argued over events that occurred during
development to account for the characteristics of perception in adults.
Every model of perception must include a consideration of the properties of
sensory systems. Psychophysics is distinguished from other approaches to studying
perception in that it involves varying well-defined stimuli to establish sensory ca-
pacity and measurement of thresholds, using one of several well-characterized
procedures. Psychophysics has always held a central position in psychology. In
fact, Boring credited Fechner, the inventor of psychophysics, with founding the
field of experimental psychology:
We come at last to the formal beginning of experimental psychology, and we start
with Fechner . who not a great philosopher nor at all a physiologist, but who
, , was
performed with scientific rigor those first experiments which laid the foundation for
the new psychology and still lie at the basis of its methodology. . . The embryo had
,
been maturing and had already assumed, in all great essentials, its later form. With
Fechner it was born, quite as old, and also quite young, a baby.'
as as
Despite Boring's developmental metaphor and the ever-present issue of per-
ceptual development, psychophysical studies of development were not conducted
until some 75 years after Fechner's death. Largely as a result of tremendous in-
creases in interest in the capacities of human infants and in developmental neu-
'From A History of Experimental Pqvchologv (2nd ed.) by E. G. Boring, 1950, New York Appleton-Century-Crofts.
xi
PREFACE
roscience, developmental psychophysics was finally established as a field of study
in the early 1970s. Only rigorous studies of perceptual behavior could determine
what information about the world was available to the infant during development
or establish the functional implications of sensory system maturation.
Developmental psychoacoustics deals with the application of psychophysical
methods to the study of auditory development. The field has grown exponentially
in the past 15 years, but it is not difficult to summarize this now rather extensive
body of literature in 25 words or less: Psychoacoustical performance of infants
and children is generally not mature. Even in the simplest psychoacoustical tasks,
such as detection of a sound in quiet, infants and children exhibit what might be
interpreted as auditory deficits compared to normally hearing adults. At this time,
developmental papers have been published on absolute sensitivity, differential
sensitivity, frequency and temporal resolution, binaural processing, and complex
sound processing. In each area, age-related changes in performance have been
identified during the first years after birth. One purpose of this volume is to sum-
marize these findings and to begin to offer explanations for them.
Progress in any scientific field is rarely without setbacks, and it is often the
case that the limitations of a method or an approach are not recognized until it
has been in use for some time. Developmental psychoacoustics is no exception: It
was only after many reports of age-related differences in psychoacoustical per-
formance had been published that doubts about the degree to which such mea-
sures reflect the optimal sensory capacities of infants and children began to be
voiced. The interpretation of age effects in psychoacoustical performance is a ma-
jor issue in this field today, and one on which there is currently no consensus. A
second motivation for preparing this volume is to discuss the variety of ways that
we may interpret psychoacoustical data on immature listeners.
The findings of developmental psychoacoustics have relevance for many re-
lated fields, including perceptual development, particularly the development of
speech perception; auditory nervous system development; psychoacoustics; and
pediatric audiology. The growth of knowledge in these fields, in turn, should have
relevance for developmental psychoacoustics. To date, the extent of interact,ion
among these fields has been limited. The reasons range from the fact that scien-
tists in some of these related fields generally do not have training in psychology
to a certain degree of defensiveness on the part of developmental psychoacousti-
cians about the psychophysical methods they use. A strong case can be made,
xii
PREFACE
however, that interactions with related fields will be important to continued prog-
ress in developmental psychoacoustics. It is doubtful, for example, that we will be
able to understand age-related change in psychoacoustic performance without ref-
erence to the underlying neural structure and function. One might also note that
while developmental psychoacousticians have been busy demonstrating that in-
fants and children perform poorly in psychoacoustic tasks, others have shown
that at the same ages, the ability to categorize and discriminate speech is re-
markably well developed. Certainly there is a need to reconcile these findings.
Finally, it is ironic that while the most commonly used method in assessing
infants’ psychoacoustic skills was developed by pediatric audiologists as a clinical
measure of hearing, developmental psychoacoustics has had very little contact
with pediatric audiologv, either in terms of further methodological developments
or in the substance of our discoveries concerning normally hearing infants and
children. Thus, a final purpose of this volume is to encourage increased dialogue
between developmental psychoacoustics and related fields.
This book has three parts, reflecting the three purposes already outlined.
Part One, “Developmental Psychoacoustics: Current Progress,” contains summar-
ies of recent findings from six laboratories. The first four chapters examine basic
auditory capacities in infants and children. Schneider and Trehub discuss their
work on the development of auditory sensitivity; Werner summarizes studies of
absolute sensitivity, frequency discrimination, and detection in noise in human
infants; Gray presents information about the ontogeny of a variety of auditory
processes in newborn chicks; and Wightman and Allen report on temporal, fre-
quency, and spectral resolution in children. The last two chapters discuss more
complex processes. Clifton summarizes the results of her program of research on
spatial hearing in infants and children, and Clarkson describes the results of her
studies on pitch perception in infants.
Throughout the chapters included in Part One, the reader will observe the
following theme: How do nonsensory factors contribute to age-related changes in
psychophysical performance? Schneider takes the position that as long as a bias-
free measure of sensitivity is used, nonsensory variables, such as motivation or
attention, have little effect on thresholds of infants and children. Both Gray and
Werner, on the other hand, take the position that although thresholds obtained
from human and avian infants do reflect sensory processes, they are also affected
by nonsensory variables. Finally, Wightman and Allen present a model of perform-
xiii
PREFACE
ance that includes attentional and memory effects that essentially account for all
of the threshold differences seen between preschool children and adults.
The question of nonsensory effects and the general issue of interpretation
of developmental psychophysical data are taken up directly in Part Two, “Inter-
pretative Issues in Developmental Psychoacoustics.” Viemeister and Schlauch of-
fer a series of simulations of infant psychometric functions that take into account
criteria1 and attentional effects and suggest a procedure for “correcting for atten-
tion” that seems to produce stable threshold estimates. Teller presents an im-
pressive study of the characteristics of the infant psychometric function in visual
acuity measurements. The section ends with Banks’s discussion of interpretive is-
sues in the context of visual development that incorporates the “ideal observer”
approach to trying to account for infant-adult differences in visual acuity.
The third part of the volume, “Developmental Psychoacoustics in the Con-
text of Hearing Science,” addresses the relationship between developmental psy-
choacoustics and related fields. Sanes’s chapter describes his work on the devel-
opment of structure and function in the auditory nervous system, suggesting ways
that changes in the nervous system with age might be reflected in behavior. Tra-
hiotis outlines some key points with respect to binaural hearing in adults that
may have important implications for studies of development in this area and de-
scribes a recent model of mature spatial hearing. Kuhl’s chapter gives a historical
perspective on the interactions that have occurred between psychoacoustics and
speech perception research as well as a detailed account of her recent work on
the development of speech prototypes in human infants. Carney’s chapter ends
the book with a discussion of the potential and the limitations of developmen-
tal psychoacoustical approaches in the clinic and ways that developmental psy-
choacoustics can provide information that would be useful to the pediatric
audiologist.
It is our hope that this volume will stimulate additional research in devel-
opmental psychoacoustics, promote an appreciation for the importance of under-
standing the sensory capacities of infants and children during development, and
encourage mutually beneficial interactions across disciplines.
This volume grew out of a conference held in August 1991 at the University
of Washington. The conference was supported by the American Psychological As-
sociation, the National Institute of Deafness and Communication Disorders, the
Virginia Merrill Bloedel Hearing Research Center, and several divisions of the
xiv
PREFACE
University of Washington: the Center for Advanced Studies in the School of Medi-
cine, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Graduate School, and the Center for
Child Development and Mental Retardation. The American Psychological Associa-
tion also provided support for the preparation of this book. The authors, co-
editor, and I would like to thank, in addition to those who provided financial
support, several individuals who were instrumental in the organization of the
conference and the preparation of this volume: Jo Ann Chavira-Bash, Lisa Rick-
ard Mancl, Janelle Constantino, Jill Bargones, Cam Marean, Beth Kopyar, Andrea
Ernst, Lisa Rubel, and Nevada Smith. Finally, our thanks go to a number of col-
leagues who provided critical reviews of the chapters included in this volume,
including Dan Ashmead, Kathy Arehart, Ed Burns, Rachel Clifton, Rich Folsom,
Lincoln Gray, Rick Hyson, Cam Marean, Davida Teller, and Neal Viemeister.
Lynne A. Werner
xv
PART ONE
Developmental
Psychoacoustics:
Current Progress