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Temporal Auditory Processing in Infancy

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Temporal Auditory Processing in Infancy Temporal Auditory Processing in Infancy SANDRA E. TREHUB Centre for Research in Human Development University of Toronto Erindale Campus Mississauga, Ontario, Canada L5L 1 C6 INTRODUCTION One of the most intriguing aspects of our perceptual system is its ability to derive relatively accurate and useful percepts of the world from sensory information, particularly when such information underspecifies the distal stimulus.' In such situa- tions, organizing processes necessarily play a prominent role. Perceptual organiza- tion in the temporal domain is particularly critical because most, if not all, mean- ingful auditory signals undergo change over time. Nevertheless, research on auditory development in general and on temporal auditory processing in particular tends to focus on the perception of relatively simple stimuli, mostly single, unchanging sounds. TEMPORAL RESOLUTION The pulselike nature of natural sounds in the environment has drawn attention to the need to distinguish continuous signals from interrupted signals, or those with gaps. In the typical study of gap detection, the experimenter attempts to determine the minimum silent interval necessary for an adult or child to report hearing two sounds rather than 0ne.~3~In the only investigation of this phenomenon with infants, Lynne Werner and her associates4 had 3-month-olds, 6-month-olds, and 12-month- olds discriminate interrupted from uninterrupted broad-band noise. The minimum detectable gap, or gap-detection threshold, was considerably larger for infants than for adults. Although there were suggestions of minor improvement in temporal resolution for 12-month-olds, such improvement likely continues until at least 6 years of age.3,5 A related ability is auditory fusion, or the perception of two successive repetitions of the same waveform as a single sound. If such fusion did not regularly occur, we would hear many more separate echoes in enclosed spaces than we actually do. It is only when the repetition follows the original sound by 30 rns or more that we hear such echoes.6As is the case with gap detection, auditory fusion has a prolonged developmental course, with improvement still evident at 9 years of age.7 Another echo-suppression phenomenon that has been investigated developmen- tally is the precedence effect.* When two identical sounds are presented from dif- ferent locations, with one sound delayed relative to the other, listeners hear a single sound emanating from the leading loudspeaker. Perception of the lagging sound is suppressed until the delay between sounds is somewhere between 4 and 40 ms, depending on the nature of stimulation, beyond which sounds are localized at their 137 138 ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES true 10cations.R.~To place this finding in context, one must understand that adults detect much shorter onset-time differences when the sounds originate from the same location. Newborn infants, in contrast to adults, respond to precedence-effect stimuli as if the sounds from both sources were audible.’OJ1By 6 months of age, and perhaps before, infants experience the precedence effect, but they continue to hear only the leading sound at onset-time differences well beyond those perceived as two suc- cessive sounds by children and adults.1ZConsistent with these reports of temporal processing delays in early life is evidence of relatively poor discrimination of signal and silence durations by infants and 5-year-old children.I3 The factors presumed responsible for infants’ poor resolution of such signals include immature temporal coding in the primary auditory pathways4 elevated thresholds for the detection of auditory ~timuli,’~~’5and difficulties with selective attention.I6 Does this mean that the auditory temporal world of infants is unlike that of adults? If auditory temporal organization depends on reasonably adequate resolu- tion of component sounds, then the infant’s temporal world would differ con- siderably. If, however, patterns of sounds can be recognized and distinguished from other patterns, even with limited resolution, then infants would have the potential to engage in adultlike temporal processing. GLOBAL PROCESSING Warren17 claims that adults perceive many auditory sequences, including speech and music, as temporal compounds or wholes, without resolving these patterns into ordered sequences of sounds. He argues, further, that our ability to identify the components of speech, for example, does not provide the basis for speech perception but rather is a consequence of such perception. In other words, auditory patterns are more than the sum of their parts, exhibiting unique emergent properties. A number of recent studies indicate that infants also engage in global or relational processing of auditory patterns. For the most part, these studies have used a con- ditioned head turn procedure originally developed for evaluating infants’ discrimina- tion of single s~unds.~~J~Briefly, infants listen to repetitions of a tone sequence presented from a loudspeaker to one side. On half of the test trials, the repeating pattern is replaced with another pattern that is altered in some respect. On the remaining trials, the repetitions continue without change, the change and no-change trials being presented in random order. When the pattern repetitions are identical, listeners can use absolute cues to guide performance. When the patterns repeat with variations, however, listeners must use relational cues to solve the task.” The ex- perimenter, who is unaware of the identity of the trials (change or no-change), records any head turns to the loudspeaker. Whenever a turn occurs within 4 seconds of a sound change, the attending computer automatically delivers reinforcement, illuminating and activating an animated toy near the loudspeaker. A significantly greater incidence of responding on change than on no-change trials indicates that infants can detect the change in question. The term “temporal” is used here in a broad as well as a narrow sense. In the narrow sense, temporal patterning refers to arrays of relative sound and silence durations, or timing. In another sense, however, all auditory events or sequences are necessarily temporal because they unfold over time. In this latter sense, manipula- tions of the relative pitch or loudness of pattern elements would alter the temporal structure of those patterns. TREHUB: TEMPORAL AUDITORY PROCESSING 139 Classi@cation of Auditory Sequences by Rhythmic Structure The pattern of relative onset times in a sequence of sounds confers a distinct temporal or rhythmic identity,21just as the pattern of relative pitches in a sequence of notes confers a distinct melodic identity.22In neither case are the absolute values critical. Leigh Thorpe and I evaluated infants’ ability to extract the temporal orga- nization of a tone sequence and to generalize this organization across variations in tempo.= Specifically, we trained infants to discriminate between three- or four-tone sequences with contrasting rhythmic structure, for example, a 1,2 (X XX) versus 2,l (XX X) pattern or a 2,2 (XX XX) versus 3,l (XXX X) pattern. Subsequently, we evaluated their ability to perform the same rhythm discrimination when the tempo, or rate of presentation, varied across repetitions. Infants succeeded in this task (see FIG.l), indicating that they could categorize auditory sequences on the basis of their temporal structure or rhythm. Presumably, this skill should enable infants to make perceptual compensations for differences in speaking rate,24to selectively direct their attention to running speech on the basis of temporal marking,25-26and to perceive the invariance of songs like “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” whether the tempo is fast or slow. Temporal Grouping When we listen to auditory sequences, we tend to group subsets of elements with- in the overall stimulus, the resulting groups being influenced by the relative duration of elements and by other parameters such as the frequency, intensity, and timbre of elements. Our disposition to group stimuli is so compelling that we even group suc- cessive tones or clicks that are identical in all re~pects.2~,~*Some of these grouping processes may be primitive in the sense that they are relatively impervious to experi- en~e.2~In such cases, our knowledge of the world or of the actual stimulus situation does not stop us from perceiving certain auditory events in a nonveridical manner. Leigh Thorpe and I examined infants’ propensity to impose temporal organization on isochronous tone ~equences.30.~~We generated six-tone patterns in which the first three tones differed from the last three in fundamental frequency, spectral structure Y.. r - c 0 Ir g 0.2 g 0.10.0 “u - Stone rhythm 4-10n0 rhythm FIGURE 1. Mean proportion of head turns on change and no-change trials for the 3-tone and 4-tone rhythms. (Data from Trehub & Thorpe, 1989.23) 140 ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES (sawtooth versus sine waves), or intensity (schematic representation: XXXOOO). We reasoned that if infants organized such sequences into two groups of three tones, as we do, then they would have greater difficulty detecting temporal perturbations between groups of tones compared with identical perturbations within a tone group. The standard patterns consisted of isochronous sequences and the comparison pat- terns had one intertone interval extended by 75 ms or more. h extended intertone interval or pause between groups (XXX 000)would preserve the presumed struc- ture of the original pattern, making such a change less noticeable. By contrast, a pause at another location (XXXO 00) would generate a new temporal structure, which would enhance the salience of this otherwise equivalent durational cue. In fact, infants more readily detected the temporal alterations when they occurred within a tone group, implying that they had grouped the original patterns of isochronous tones on the basis of similar pitch, loudness, or timbre. Moreover, greater disparities in the grouping parameter (e.g., fundamental frequency) promoted stronger grouping ef- fects. We have labeled this phenomenon the duration illusion, referring to the mis- perception of silent intervals at critical locations in a stimulus sequence.
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