Everyday and everywhere, a cacophony of sounds compete for children's attention. Because humans have binaural hearing - hearing with two ears - children usually can determine which sounds are more important: student chatter in the back of the classroom or the teacher's lesson on multiplication, for example.
"Binaural hearing enables us to understand and engage in the world around us," says Litovsky, a UW-Madison communicative disorders professor and an investigator at the Waisman Center, a facility devoted to advancing the knowledge of human development.
Without binaural hearing, different noises would blur together and become overwhelming. Thus, an impairment affecting binaural hearing could limit a child's ability to pick out important sounds in noisy environments, which in turn could affect learning, speaking and, more generally, concentration.
Until now, no test effectively evaluated how well children can tune in some sounds and tune out others. "Most hearing tests that are available clinically are done in quiet rooms, which make it hard to predict how a child, especially one fitted with a hearing aid or cochlear implant, might perform in noisy rooms," Litovsky says.
Litovsky's test, on the other hand, simulates the noisy world by including a variety of competing voices and other sounds that children might hear at school, on the playground or at home. Results so far show that some children can separate sounds better than others.
Children who take Litovsky's test, or "game," sit in front of a computer surrounded by a semicircle of loudspeakers. They listen for words that match pictures on the screen. Sometimes, they might hear only one voice asking
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Contact: Ruth Litovsky
litovsky@waisman.wisc.edu
608-262-5045
University of Wisconsin-Madison
23-May-2002