SPECTRAL WEIGHTS IN LEVEL DISCRIMINATION BY PRESCHOOL-CHILDREN - ANALYTIC LISTENING CONDITIONS

In this series of experiments, adult and child listeners were required to attend to a target tone in the presence of two distracters and to indicate in which of two intervals the target tone had the higher leve l. The attentional weight listeners placed on each component was estim ated by computing the correlation between the level change of each com ponent across intervals and the Listener's response. In the first expe riment, weights were obtained as a function of the mean level of the d istracters (250 and 4000 Hz) for a 1000-Hz target. No consistent diffe rences between the weighting functions of children and adults were obs erved. In a second experiment, weights were obtained as a function of the harmonic relationship between the distracters (250 and 4000 Hz, or 270 and 4320 Hz) and the 1000-Hz target. No difference was observed b etween the weighting functions computed with harmonic and inharmonic c omplexes. In the final experiment, each component of the complex (250, 1000, and 4000 Hz) was identified as the target in separate blocks of trials. In general, adults were able to weight the target component a ppropriately regardless of its frequency, while children tended to wei ght all components equally. The results suggest that preschool listene rs may exhibit poorer attentional selectivity than adults. (C) 1997 Ac oustical Society of America.