Development of auditory processing in 6-12-year-old children: a longitudinal study

The development of auditory processing in children was investigated in a longitudinal study. A group of 20 children with normal cognitive and language development underwent several auditory tests at the ages of 6, 7, 8, 10 and 12 years. At the age of 10 years, three subjects were lost to follow-up, as was one more subject at the age of 12 years. The auditory performance of the children was compared to the performance of a group of 20 adults. The auditory test battery consisted of a speech-in-noise test, a filtered speech test, a binaural fusion test and two auditory sequencing tests. At the ages of 6, 7 and 8 years, data on the performance on an auditory word discrimination test, an auditory synthesis test, an auditory closure test and a number recall test were also obtained. All auditory tests except the speech-in-noise test showed a clear effect of age on the performance of children. Our data suggest that maturational effects play an important role in auditory processing (at least) up to an age of 12-13 years. Correlations between the tests are in general not indicative of large amounts of overlap between the different tests. Factor analysis shows that three factors account for 68-70% of explained variance, with the three factors contributing equally. A composite score obtained by averaging all (sub)test scores can be used next to the individual test scores to describe the development of auditory processing abilities in children. Se investigó el desarrollo del procesamiento auditivo en niños mediante un estudio longitudinal. Un grupo de 20 niños con desarrollo cognitivo y lingüístico normal fue sometido a diversas pruebas auditivas a los 6, 7, 8, 10 y 12 años. Durante el seguimiento, se perdieron 3 casos a la edad de 10 años y uno más a la edad de 12. El rendimiento auditivo de los niños se comparó con el de un grupo de 20 adultos. La batería para la evaluación auditiva consistió en una prueba de lenguaje en ruido, una de lenguaje filtrado, una de fusión binaural y dos de secuencias auditivas. A las edades de 6, 7 y 8 años, se obtuvieron tambiélos datos de rendimiento en una prueba de discriminación auditiva de palabras, una de síntesis auditiva, una de clausura auditiva y una de memoria de n s. Todas las pruebas, excepto la de lenguaje en ruido, mostraron un claro efecto de la edad en el rendimiento de los niños. Nuestros datos sugieren que los efectos de maduración juegan un papel importante en el procesamiento auditivo (al menos) hasta la edad de 12-1