title: Behavioral Assessment of Hearing in 2 to 4 Year-old Children: A Two-interval, Observer-based Procedure Using Conditioned Play-based Responses.
abstract: Collecting reliable behavioral data from toddlers and preschoolers is challenging. As a result, there are significant gaps in our understanding of human auditory development for these age groups. This paper describes an observer-based procedure for measuring hearing sensitivity with a two-interval, two-alternative forced-choice paradigm. Young children are trained to perform a play-based, motor response (e.g., putting a block in a bucket) whenever they hear a target signal. An experimenter observes the child's behavior and makes a judgment about whether the signal was presented during the first or second observation interval; the experimenter is blinded to the true signal interval, so this judgment is based solely on the child's behavior. These procedures were used to test 2 to 4 year-olds (n = 33) with no known hearing problems. The signal was a 1,000 Hz warble tone presented in quiet, and the signal level was adjusted to estimate a threshold corresponding to 71%-correct detection. A valid threshold was obtained for 82% of children. These results indicate that the two-interval procedure is both feasible and reliable for use with toddlers and preschoolers. The two-interval, observer-based procedure described in this paper is a powerful tool for evaluating hearing in young children because it guards against response bias on the part of the experimenter.
authors.affiliation: Department of Allied Health Sciences, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder; angela.bonino@colorado.edu.
authors.forename: Angela Yarnell
authors.initials: AY
authors.lastname: Bonino
authors.affiliation: Center for Hearing Research, Boys Town National Research Hospital.
authors.forename: Lori J
authors.initials: LJ
authors.lastname: Leibold
mesh_terms: D001309:Auditory Threshold; D002652:Child Behavior; D002675:Child, Preschool; D006309:Hearing; D006320:Hearing Tests / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D010988:Play and Playthings