Auditory Sequential Organization Among Children With and Without a Hearing Loss

The present investigation examined the ability of children with and without a hearing loss to correctly reproduce sequences of acoustic stimuli that varied in number, temporal spacing, and type. Forty-eight children took part in the investigation. They were divided into four groups: two groups of 6- and 7-year-old children, 12 with normal hearing and 12 with a sensorineural hearing loss; and two groups of 9- and 10-year-old children, 12 with normal hearing and 12 with a sensorineural hearing loss. All of the children completed auditory temporal sequencing tasks with verbal (/ba/ and /da/) and nonverbal (a 1-kHz pure tone and a wide band noise) acoustic stimuli. For the 6- and 7-year-old children, the results revealed a significant difference between the children with a hearing loss and their peers with normal hearing for immediate recall of verbal sequences. There were no significant differences in performance between the children with a hearing loss and their peers with normal hearing on the nonverbal sequencing tasks or on the nonverbal and verbal memory span tasks. For the 9- and 10-year-old children, the results did not show any significant differences in performance between the two groups of children for the reproduction of sequences containing more than two verbal or nonverbal elements nor for the auditory memory span task when the sequences consisted of verbal stimuli. For the recall of two verbal stimuli with a variable interstimulus interval (ISI) duration, the results showed that the children with a hearing loss experienced more difficulty than the children with normal hearing. Overall, the results indicated that on the auditory sequential organization tasks, the poorer performance of the children with a hearing loss is likely attributable to auditory perceptual processing deficits rather than to poorer short-term memory capabilities. Also, an analysis of the data revealed that the older children obtained significantly better results than the younger children on auditory sequential organization tasks.