The human auditory system is often portrayed as precocious in its development. In fact, many aspects of basic auditory processing appear to be adult-like by the middle of the first year of postnatal life. However, processes such as attention and sound source determination take much longer to develop. Immaturity of higher-level processes limits the processing of both simple and complex sounds by infants and children. Young listeners with impaired hearing may be at a particular disadvantage, in that they must make sense of sounds on the basis of a degraded representation using immature perceptual strategies.
Learning outcomes: (1) Readers will be able to describe three stages of human auditory development. (2) Readers will be able to describe how experience with sound is important in auditory development. (3) Readers will be able to describe the role of attention and other higher-level processes in early audition.