Naturalistic auditory scene analysis in children and adults

Abstract

In order to make sense of natural auditory environments, the developing child must learn to ‘‘navigate’’ through complex auditory scenes in order to segment out relevant auditory information from irrelevant sounds. This study investigated some of the informational and attentional factors that constrain environmental sound detection in auditory scenes, and how these factors change over development. Thirty‐two children (aged 9–12 years) and 16 adults were asked to detect short target environmental sounds (e.g., a dog barking) within longer environmental background sounds (e.g., a barn) presented dichotically. The target environmental sounds were either congruent (i.e., normally associated with the background) or incongruent. Subjects heard either a single background presented to both the ipsilateral and contralateral ears or else different background sounds presented to the different ears. Results indicate that children’s, but not adults’ target detection is substantially less accurate when listening to two auditory scenes than to a single scene presented in both ears, suggesting a developmental shift in listeners’ abilities to process multiple information streams. Interestingly, both children and adults find incongruent sounds more salient than congruent sounds. Furthermore, this incongruence ‘‘pop‐out’’ effect is greatly reduced in the presence of the dual background (informational masking) condition.