title: An on-line task for contrasting auditory processing in the verbal and nonverbal domains and norms for younger and older adults.
abstract: Contrasting linguistic and nonlinguistic processing has been of interest to many researchers with different scientific, theoretical, or clinical questions. However, previous work on this type of comparative analysis and experimentation has been limited. In particular, little is known about the differences and similarities between the perceptual, cognitive, and neural processing of nonverbal environmental sounds and that of speech sounds. With the aim of contrasting verbal and nonverbal processing in the auditory modality, we developed a new on-line measure that can be administered to subjects from different clinical, neurological, or sociocultural groups. This is an on-line task of sound to picture matching, in which the sounds are either environmental sounds or their linguistic equivalents and which is controlled for potential task and item confounds across the two sound types. Here, we describe the design and development of our measure and report norming data for healthy subjects from two different adult age groups: younger adults (18-24 years of age) and older adults (54-78 years of age). We also outline other populations to which the test has been or is being administered. In addition to the results reported here, the test can be useful to other researchers who are interested in systematically contrasting verbal and nonverbal auditory processing in other populations.
authors.affiliation: University of California, San Diego, Department of Cognitive Science, La Jolla, CA 92093-0515, USA. saygin@crl.ucsd.edu
authors.forename: Ayşe Pinar
authors.initials: AP
authors.lastname: Saygin
authors.forename: Frederic
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Dick
authors.forename: Elizabeth
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Bates
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging / Q000523:psychology*; D001245:Association Learning; D001307:Auditory Perception; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008432:Mathematical Computing; D011939:Mental Recall; D008875:Middle Aged; D009862:Online Systems; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010865:Pilot Projects; D011571:Psychoacoustics; D011930:Reaction Time; D012984:Software; D013067:Speech Perception; D013223:Statistics as Topic