Age-related changes in auditory temporal perception (original) (raw)
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Age effects on measures of auditory duration discrimination
Journal of speech and hearing research, 1994
This study examined auditory temporal sensitivity in young adult and elderly listeners using psychophysical tasks that measured duration discrimination. Listeners in the experiments were divided into groups of young and elderly subjects with normal hearing sensitivity and with mild-to-moderate sloping sensorineural hearing loss. Temporal thresholds in all tasks were measured with an adaptive forced-choice procedure using tonal stimuli centered at 500 Hz and 4000 Hz. Difference limens for duration were measured for tone bursts (250 msec reference duration) and for silent intervals between tone bursts (250 msec and 6.4 msec reference durations). Results showed that the elderly listeners exhibited diminished duration discrimination for both tones and silent intervals when the reference duration was 250 msec. Hearing loss did not affect these results. Discrimination of the brief temporal gap (6.4 msec) was influenced by age and hearing loss, but these effects were not consistent across ...
Age effects on discrimination of timing in auditory sequences
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2004
The experiments examined age-related changes in temporal sensitivity to increments in the interonset intervals ͑IOI͒ of components in tonal sequences. Discrimination was examined using reference sequences consisting of five 50-ms tones separated by silent intervals; tone frequencies were either fixed at 4 kHz or varied within a 2-4-kHz range to produce spectrally complex patterns. The tonal IOIs within the reference sequences were either equal ͑200 or 600 ms͒ or varied individually with an average value of 200 or 600 ms to produce temporally complex patterns. The difference limen ͑DL͒ for increments of IOI was measured. Comparison sequences featured either equal increments in all tonal IOIs or increments in a single target IOI, with the sequential location of the target changing randomly across trials. Four groups of younger and older adults with and without sensorineural hearing loss participated. Results indicated that DLs for uniform changes of sequence rate were smaller than DLs for single target intervals, with the largest DLs observed for single targets embedded within temporally complex sequences. Older listeners performed more poorly than younger listeners in all conditions, but the largest age-related differences were observed for temporally complex stimulus conditions. No systematic effects of hearing loss were observed.
Age effects on duration discrimination with simple and complex stimuli
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1995
This study examined age-related changes in temporal processing by measuring DLs for signal duration using simple and complex stimuli. Previous research has shown that elderly listeners exhibit difficulty discriminating duration changes in simple sounds, suggesting the possibility of age-related changes in central timing mechanisms. The present experiments examined the interactive effects of aging, hearing loss, and stimulus complexity on duration discrimination. Four groups participated: young and elderly listeners with normal hearing, and young and elderly listeners with hearing loss. Duration DLs were measured for 250-ms tone bursts and for silent gaps between tone bursts that were presented either in isolation or embedded as target stimuli within tonal sequences. The tone sequences were composed of five sequential 250-ms components. Stimulus complexity was varied by changing the sequential order of tone frequencies and the location of an embedded target component across listening conditions. Analyses of results revealed the following: Elderly listeners performed more poorly than younger listeners in nearly all stimulus conditions, the effects of stimulus complexity on discrimination were greatest among elderly listeners, and hearing loss had no systematic effect on discrimination performance.
Aging and temporal discrimination in auditory sequences
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2001
This study examined age-related changes in temporal sensitivity to increments in the inter-onset intervals ͑IOI͒ of successive components in tonal sequences. Temporal discrimination was examined using reference stimulus patterns consisting of five 50-ms, 4000-Hz components with equal tonal IOIs selected from the range 100-600 ms. Discrimination was examined in separate conditions by measuring the relative difference limen ͑DL͒ for increments of tonal IOI in comparison sequences. In some conditions, comparison sequences featured equal increments of all tonal IOIs to examined listener sensitivity to uniform changes of sequence rate, or tempo. Other conditions measured the DL for increments of a single target IOI within otherwise uniform-rate comparison sequences. For these measurements, the single target IOI was either fixed in sequence location, or randomized in location across listening trials. Listeners in the study included four groups of young and elderly adults with and without high-frequency hearing loss. The results for all listeners showed the relative DL for rate discrimination to decrease from a maximum at the 100-ms IOI to a smaller stable value across the range of longer sequence IOI. All listeners also exhibited larger relative DLs for discrimination of single target intervals compared to rate discrimination for equivalent reference IOI values. Older listeners showed poorer performance than younger listeners in all conditions, with the largest age differences observed for discrimination of brief single intervals that were varied randomly in sequence location. None of the results revealed significant effects of hearing loss on performance of younger and older listeners.
Infant Auditory Temporal Acuity: Gap Detection
Child Development, 1992
. The development of auditory temporal acuity during infancy was examined in 3-, 6-, and 12-month-old infants and in adults using the gap detection paradigm. Listeners detected a series of gaps, or silent intervals, of variable duration in a broadband noise. In order to vary the acoustic frequencies available to the listener, a high-pass noise was used to mask frequencies above specified cutoffs. High-pass maskers with cutoffs of 500, 2,000, and 8,000 Hz were used. The minimum detectable gap was determined using the Observer-based Psychoacoustic Procedure. The thresholds of 3-and 6-month-olds were considerably poorer than those of the adults, although the effect of masker condition was about the same for these 3 groups. The thresholds of 12-month-olds were significantly worse than the adults when the stimulus was unmasked or when the masker cutoff frequency was 2,000 or 8,000 Hz. When the masker cutoff frequency was 500 Hz, 12-month-olds fell into 2 groups: some had gap thresholds that were about the same as 3-and 6-month-oIds, while some had gap thresholds that approached those of adults. In a second experiment, a larger group of 12-month-olds were tested with a 500-Hz masker cutoff. Average performance of 12-month-olds was about the same as that of 3-and 6-month-olds in Experiment 1. Some infants attained thresholds close to those of adults. Thus, gap detection thresholds are quite poor in infants, although the similarity of the effect of frequency on performance in infants and adults suggests that the mechanisms governing temporal resolution in infants operate qualitiatively like those in adults. Temporal cues have frequently been creased progressively between 3 and 11 shown to be critical to both human and non-years. A similar age effect was observed for human communication (e.g., all tone frequencies and intensities. Irwin, Pisoni, 1977). Moreover, a relation between meatemporal acuity and the ability to under-sured gap detection threshold, or the ministand speech has been demonstrated among mally detectable silent interval in a continuhuman listeners (e.g., Dreschler & Plomp, ous sound, for children and adults. They 1980). The few studies examining the devel-found that 6-year-olds had higher gap detecopment of temporal acuity suggest that im-tion thresholds than older children or adults, maturity of this capacity may even persist This effect was more pronounced at lower into childhood. intensities and when a low-frequency noise determined the duration of a silent interval band was the stimulus. In contrast, Wightbetween two tone bursts required for chil-man, Allen, Dolan, Kistler, and Jamieson dren to report hearing two sounds rather (1989) found that 6-year-olds were adultlike than one sound. The threshold duration de-in gap detection at both 400 and 2,000 Hz.
Auditory temporal processing in elderly listeners
Journal of the American Academy of Audiology, 1996
This paper examines the hypothesis that auditory temporal processing is impaired in elderly listeners. Several recent psychoacoustic studies are reviewed that describe various aspects of temporal processing that appear to be influenced by aging. The temporal phenomena range from measures of temporal resolution and duration discrimination to sequential processing of complex stimulus patterns. For many of the research findings, age-related deficits on temporal performance measures are unaffected by the presence of presbyacusic hearing loss. Additionally, the consequences of aging on auditory temporal processing appear to be correlated with the complexity of stimulation and the difficulty of the listening tasks.
Perception of the duration of auditory and visual stimuli in children and adults,”
2004
This experiment investigated the effect of modality on temporal discrimination in children aged 5 and 8 years and adults using a bisection task with visual and auditory stimuli ranging from 200 to 800 ms. In the first session, participants were required to compare stimulus durations with standard durations presented in the same modality (within-modality session), and in the second session in different modalities (cross-modal session). Psychophysical functions were orderly in all age groups, with the proportion of long responses (judgement that a duration was more similar to the long than to the short standard) increasing with the stimulus duration, although functions were flatter in the 5-year-olds than in the 8-year-olds and adults. Auditory stimuli were judged to be longer than visual stimuli in all age groups. The statistical results and a theoretical model suggested that this modality effect was due to differences in the pacemaker speed of the internal clock. The 5-year-olds als...
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2019
The ability to detect amplitude modulation (AM) is essential to distinguish the spectro-temporal features of speech from those of a competing masker. Previous work shows that AM sensitivity improves until 10 years of age. This may relate to the development of sensory factors (tuning of AM filters, susceptibility to AM masking) or to changes in processing efficiency (reduction in internal noise, optimization of decision strategies). To disentangle these hypotheses, three groups of children (5-11 years) and one of young adults completed psychophysical tasks measuring thresholds for detecting sinusoidal AM (with a rate of 4, 8, or 32 Hz) applied to carriers whose inherent modulations exerted different amounts of AM masking. Results showed that between 5 and 11 years, AM detection thresholds improved and that susceptibility to AM masking slightly increased. However, the effects of AM rate and carrier were not associated with age, suggesting that sensory factors are mature by 5 years. Subsequent modelling indicated that reducing internal noise by a factor 10 accounted for the observed developmental trends. Finally, children's consonant identification thresholds in noise related to some extent to AM sensitivity. Increased efficiency in AM detection may support better use of temporal information in speech during childhood.
Age-related differences in identification and discrimination of temporal cues in speech segments
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2006
This study investigated age-related differences in sensitivity to temporal cues in modified natural speech sounds. Listeners included young noise-masked subjects, elderly normal-hearing subjects, and elderly hearing-impaired subjects. Four speech continua were presented to listeners, with stimuli from each continuum varying in a single temporal dimension. The acoustic cues varied in separate continua were voice-onset time, vowel duration, silence duration, and transition duration. In separate conditions, the listeners identified the word stimuli, discriminated two stimuli in a same-different paradigm, and discriminated two stimuli in a 3-interval, 2-alternative forced-choice procedure. Results showed age-related differences in the identification function crossover points for the continua that varied in silence duration and transition duration. All listeners demonstrated shorter difference limens ͑DLs͒ for the three-interval paradigm than the two-interval paradigm, with older hearing-impaired listeners showing larger DLs than the other listener groups for the silence duration cue. The findings support the general hypothesis that aging can influence the processing of specific temporal cues that are related to consonant manner distinctions.
Noise increment detection in children 1 to 3 years of age
Perception & Psychophysics, 2000
Studies using burst comparison procedures to examine age-related changes in intensity discrimination have reported that the ability to discriminate differences in intensity does not reach maturity until late childhood. In the present study, developmental changes in intensity discrimination were examined in 1-to 3-year-old children, using an increment detection paradigm. Children and adults detected increments in a continuous standard presented at three levels ranging from 35 to 55 dB SPL.Adults were also tested at lower levels of the standard in order to permit age comparisons at equivalent sensation levels. Standard stimuli were two-octave bands of noise centered at either 400 or 4000Hz, and increments were 200 msec in duration. Discrimination performance improved significantly with both age and level of the standard. For all age groups, performance was significantly better for high-than for lowfrequency stimuli, but frequency-dependent differences in increment thresholds did not vary reliably with age. Age differences were largest at low levels ofthe standard. At the highest level (approximately 30 dB nHL), children's difference limens for both low-and high-frequency noise bands were adultlike by 3 years of age. These results suggest that the developmental time course of increment detection is more rapid than that previously reported in burst comparison studies. Although the ability to detect a change in the level of a sound is one of the most basic auditory capacities, little is known about the time course of its development. The few studies that have examined intensity discrimination in young listeners indicate that performance is relatively poor during infancy and continues to improve well into childhood, but, as yet, there is no consensus on the age at which adultlike performance is achieved. The results ofat least three studies suggest that the ability to discriminate differences in intensity matures relatively late. Both Faires and Lankford (1976) and Fior and Bolzonello (1987) determined children's intensity difference limens (DLs) for pure tones and found that performance continued to improve through at least 10 years of age. Similarly, Maxon and Hochberg (1982) reported a progressive improvement in the DL for tones through 12 years of age, the oldest group tested. In contrast to these findings, results reported by Jensen and Neff(1993) suggest a more rapid course of development. They used a video game format to obtain children's DLs for a 440-Hz tone and found that, for most children, performance was adultlike by 5 years of age. Werner and Marean (1996, p. 95) have recently questioned whether the ability to discriminate differences in intensity develops at all during childhood. Citing differences in procedure across studies and the great variability in performance among young listeners, they suggested that the sensory mechanisms underlying intensity discrimina