Mishra Srikanta K, Saxena Udit
Department of Communication Sciences & Disorders, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Edinburg, TX, United States.
MAA Institute of Speech & Hearing, Hyderabad, India.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2020 Nov 12;14:591101. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2020.591101. eCollection 2020.
Immature auditory perception in children has generally been ascribed to deficiencies in cognitive factors, such as working memory and inattention. This notion appears to be commonly accepted for all children despite limited empirical evidence. In the present work, we examined whether working memory capacity would predict basic aspects of hearing, pure-tone frequency discrimination and temporal gap detection, in typically-developing, normal-hearing children (7-12 years). Contrary to our expectation, working memory capacity, as measured by digit spans, or intrinsic auditory attention (on- and off-task response variability) did not consistently predict the individual variability in auditory perception. Present results provide no evidence for a role of working memory capacity in basic measures of auditory perception in children. This lack of a relationship may partly explain why some children with perceptual deficits despite normal audiograms (commonly referred to as auditory processing disorders) may have typical cognitive abilities.
儿童不成熟的听觉感知通常被归因于认知因素的缺陷，如工作记忆和注意力不集中。尽管实证证据有限，但这一观点似乎被所有儿童普遍接受。在本研究中，我们考察了工作记忆容量是否能预测发育正常、听力正常的儿童（7至12岁）听力的基本方面，即纯音频率辨别和时间间隙检测。与我们的预期相反，通过数字广度测量的工作记忆容量或内在听觉注意力（任务中及任务外反应变异性）并不能始终如一地预测听觉感知的个体差异。目前的结果没有为工作记忆容量在儿童听觉感知基本测量中的作用提供证据。这种缺乏关联的情况可能部分解释了为什么一些听力图正常但仍存在感知缺陷的儿童（通常称为听觉处理障碍）可能具有典型的认知能力。
