title: Sensitivity of school-aged children to pitch-related cues.
abstract: Two experiments investigated the ability of 17 school-aged children to process purely temporal and spectro-temporal cues that signal changes in pitch. Percentage correct was measured for the discrimination of sinusoidal amplitude modulation rate (AMR) of broadband noise in experiment 1 and for the discrimination of fundamental frequency (F0) of broadband sine-phase harmonic complexes in experiment 2. The reference AMR was 100 Hz as was the reference F0. A child-friendly interface helped listeners to remain attentive to the task. Data were fitted using a maximum-likelihood technique that extracted threshold, slope, and lapse rate. All thresholds were subsequently standardized to a common d' value equal to 0.77. There were relatively large individual differences across listeners: eight had relatively adult-like thresholds in both tasks and nine had higher thresholds. However, these individual differences did not vary systematically with age, over the span of 6-16 yr. Thresholds were correlated across the two tasks and were about nine times finer for F0 discrimination than for AMR discrimination as has been previously observed in adults.
authors.affiliation: Cochlear Implants and Psychophysics Lab, Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA. mderoch2@jhmi.edu
authors.forename: Mickael L D
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: Deroche
authors.forename: Danielle J
authors.initials: DJ
authors.lastname: Zion
authors.forename: Jaclyn R
authors.initials: JR
authors.lastname: Schurman
authors.forename: Monita
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Chatterjee
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D001309:Auditory Threshold; D002648:Child; D003463:Cues; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D009622:Noise; D010470:Perceptual Masking / Q000502:physiology; D010897:Pitch Discrimination / Q000502:physiology*; D013061:Speech Acoustics