Effect of Background Noise on Temporal Processing in Children and Young-adults

Abstract

Temporal processing refers to the ability of auditory system to resolve an acoustic signal in time domain. Temporal processing is critical to a wide variety of everyday listening tasks, including, speech perception and perception of music). Although the importance of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is well documented in speech perception experiments, it has been not been explored in temporal processing experiments. Both physiological and psychophysical experiments show degraded auditory performance in the presence of background noise. It is very much possible that background noise might alter the ability to process auditory signals in time domain, i.e., the ability to detect a gap in a continuous signal. From the result of study it was discovered that as the signal to noise ratio (SNR) was decreased from + 15 dB SNR to 0 dB SNR there was a significant deterioration in Gap detection thresholds. Children perform similarly in Gap detection test by the age of 9 to 10 years.