Auditory learning and development

Effective communication in everyday situations often involves hearing and interpreting speech in noisy conditions. Older listeners, people with hearing impairments and children with language-learning difficulties find listening to speech-in-noise particularly difficult. An ultimate goal for our research is to help these populations communicate more successfully, despite their difficulties. We take several approaches towards achieving this goal. Firstly, we are developing better clinical tools to assess and more effectively identify children with listening difficulties. Secondly, to better understand these difficulties, we are investigating how processing of auditory inputs from the brain changes with age. Finally, we are developing more effective training programmes to improve listening abilities.

Our research suggests the benefits of training depend not only on the task or the sounds used for training, but also on the ability of the individual to attend to and remember what they hear.

Auditory processing is fundamental to effective communication, particularly in challenging listening conditions. However, there is considerable variation in ability to efficiently process and use auditory inputs across the lifespan. Most of this variation is thought to reflect cognitive factors associated with the central auditory system rather than sensory processes located at the periphery of the system. This programme aims to further understand how central and peripheral mechanisms interact to modulate individual listening efficiency across the lifespan. We consider listening efficiency in both typical individuals and individuals with some form of listening difficulty. Ultimately, we hope to translate this learning into clinical benefit by developing more effective assessment tools and auditory training regimes to assess and treat patients with listening difficulties.

Primary outcomes from our work to date are, (i) a new scale (the ECLiPS) to profile children’s listening abilities, (ii) a test of auditory attention (the TAIL) (iii) supra-threshold auditory and cognitive age-norms, and (iv) a delineation of important regimen specific factors modulating auditory learning efficiency. The ECLiPS is proving to offer valuable insight into the nature of listening difficulties in children. Research in auditory training underlines the importance of carefully structured training regimens involving positive not negative feedback. The test of auditory attention is providing insights into the differences between auditory and visual attention.

In other research this year, we showed how training beat perception in older adults resulted not only in improved beat perception but importantly, improved speech-in-noise listening. Interestingly, in this context older adults show greater reliance on cognitive abilities when listening in noise. In children with auditory processing disorder, we demonstrated deficits in auditory specific sustained attention. Moreover, we showed how relative strength in sustained attention acts as a protective factor for supporting normal development of language and listening abilities.

In summary, our research highlights the need for an individualised approach to training and rehabilitation. Our findings provide converging evidence that auditory perceptual abilities in younger and older populations depend on cognitive factors such as attention, working memory and general IQ. Aspects of cognition, and in particular attention appear to be more important than bottom-up channel sharpening to improve perception through training. These findings inform our endeavours to appropriately tailor training programmes to improve speech perception not only in children with auditory and language-learning disorders, but also in older hearing-impaired individuals and cochlear-implant users.