![]() This, in turn, could result in the misdiagnosis of true auditory disorders ( Keith et al., 2018). For example, the lack of knowledge about the influence of cognitive influences on auditory perception tests could lead to a speculative assumption that cognitive ability is causally related to poor auditory performance in children. The extent to which auditory perception in children can be attributed to cognitive factors has direct and important translational implications for defining auditory processing disorders-a longstanding, controversial as well as a contemporary issue in pediatric audiology and auditory neuroscience ( Cacace and McFarland, 2013 Moore et al., 2013 Moore, 2018 Wilson, 2018). It is currently unclear whether a relationship between working memory and auditory perception exists for typically-developing children without listening difficulties. Table 1 presents a summary of relevant findings and demonstrates some inconsistencies in the literature. In contrast, other studies have failed to find a relationship between measures of working memory and performance on auditory tasks, such as frequency discrimination and gap detection, for children with suspected auditory processing disorders ( Sharma et al., 2009 Ahmmed et al., 2014 Tomlin et al., 2015). (2010) showed that poor performance on auditory tasks, e.g., frequency discrimination, in children (6–11 years) is attributable to cognitive abilities such as attention and working memory. In recent years, it is thought that working memory may contribute to the variability in auditory perception among children. It is intuitively appealing to explain the immature auditory performance in children in terms of cognitive factors such as working memory capacity. Due to the sequential and temporal nature of sound, working memory appears to be important for auditory processing. Generally, working memory increases steeply up to 8 years of age, and shows more gradual improvement thereafter until about 11–12 years of age (e.g., Gathercole, 1999). This developmental period parallels the development of working memory-briefly, a limited capacity cognitive system to store and manipulate information ( Baddeley, 2012). Many aspects of auditory perception in children follow a protracted period of development ( Sanes and Woolley, 2011). This lack of a relationship may partly explain why some children with perceptual deficits despite normal audiograms (commonly referred to as auditory processing disorders) may have typical cognitive abilities. Present results provide no evidence for a role of working memory capacity in basic measures of auditory perception in children. Contrary to our expectation, working memory capacity, as measured by digit spans, or intrinsic auditory attention (on- and off-task response variability) did not consistently predict the individual variability in auditory perception. In the present work, we examined whether working memory capacity would predict basic aspects of hearing, pure-tone frequency discrimination and temporal gap detection, in typically-developing, normal-hearing children (7–12 years). This notion appears to be commonly accepted for all children despite limited empirical evidence. Immature auditory perception in children has generally been ascribed to deficiencies in cognitive factors, such as working memory and inattention. 2MAA Institute of Speech & Hearing, Hyderabad, India.1Department of Communication Sciences & Disorders, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Edinburg, TX, United States.As long as students are covertly translating from a signed into a spoken language, teachers need to take into account students' limited memory span for signs. Second, large individual differences in memory span for signs imply that teachers who require students to recall or translate signed discourse must take care to avoid a bias favoring students with a longer memory span. First, a short memory span for signs is evidence that signs are more complex than digits or words, possessing more features that need to be stored in short-term memory. The correlation between digits forward and signs (r = 0.419) was significant. Memory span for signs was significantly shorter than memory span for digits forward (6.94) and the mean reported elsewhere for words (5.5). The standard deviation of their memory span for signs was 1.11. The mean number of signs recalled by these hearing subjects was 4.44, slightly less than the mean of 4.9 previously reported for deaf subjects. Thirty-six hearing college students with approximately one semester experience in a beginning course in American Sign Language were tested for their memory span for signs and for digits forward and backward. ![]()
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