The Development of a Lexical Tone Dichotic Listening Test for Cantonese-Speaking Children-A Research Proposal

Abstract

Dichotic listening (DL) is a key diagnostic tool for identifying auditory processing deficits (Jerger, 2007). In DL tests, two different acoustic stimuli are presented one to each ear simultaneously and the subjects are required to respond to the stimuli with divided attention (attend to stimuli presented from both ears), or directed attention (attend to stimuli presented from a particular ear). By contrasting the performance from the two ears in the directed and divided attention conditions would help review the maturation of auditory processing, and the development of higher cognitive attentional modulation on the bottom-up perceptual auditory processing (Hugdahl, 2011; Hugdahl et al., 2009). Lexical tones develop early in children's language which can be used to reveal DL development beginning at a much younger age than in previous developmental studies. This review paper will discuss the background and the motivation of a proposal for running a pediatric normative study on the developmental trajectory of DL in children. We have tested an innovative test procedure in lexical tone DL and have proven feasible in testing children as young as 2~3 years.