Establishing normative data for five new temporal auditory processing tests in primary-school aged children

OBJECTIVES: To establish normative data and investigate the impact of age and sex in children for five new tests of auditory processing that do not involve speech, but which include stimuli as acoustically complex as speech. The tests are: Adaptive within-channel gap detection (WCGD), Adaptive between-channel gap detection (BCGD), Spectro-temporal resolution - Sweep (STR-S), Spectro-temporal resolution - Duration (STR-D), and Adaptive Temporal Fine Structure (TFS) tests.

DESIGN: A cross-sectional study.

STUDY SAMPLE: 194 normally-hearing 6-to-11-year-old children, who spoke English either natively or as a Second Language (ESL) completed a randomly assigned subset of tests: WCGD ( n =  115), BCGD ( n =  111), STR-S ( n =  120), STR-D ( n =  116), and TFS ( n =  100).

RESULTS: Normative ranges and z-score were established for all tests. Analyses showed moderate correlations between BCGD and WCGD (r = 0.43), BCGD and STR-S (r = 0.38), BCGD and STR-D (r = 0.44), BCGD and TFS (r = 0.38), WCGD and TFS (r = 0.34) and STR-S and STR-D (r = 0.53), and a weak correlation between STR-S and TFS (r = 0.20). A multi-linear regression showed effects of age but not sex on all five test thresholds.

CONCLUSIONS: These validated tests allow audiologists to assess children as young as six years old and thereby identify difficulties early as an initial step to intervention.