Lakhasly

Fundamentals of Auditory Training There have recently been several reports of dramatic improvements in children's listening and/or language skills following auditory training.In a frequency discrimination (FD) task, listeners are presented with two or more pure tones of different frequencies and are asked to distinguish them, by choosing which of two tones is higher or lower in pitch (e.g., Fig.However, although we firmly believe that effective remediation should not be withheld from children, no (published) attempt has been made by the developers of these training programs to optimize them, in terms of the trained tasks, the stimuli, or the training regimes.A decrease in the frequency difference required to discriminate the tones is indicative of learning Fig.1 shows typical learning curves for a FD task in adult listeners.

Fundamentals of Auditory Training
There have recently been several reports of dramatic improvements in children's listening and/or language skills following auditory training. These are reviewed briefly in the next section. However, although we firmly believe that effective remediation should not be withheld from children, no (published) attempt has been made by the developers of these training programs to optimize them, in terms of the trained tasks, the stimuli, or the training regimes. Training clearly works, at least for some children, but we lack an understanding of the parameters that govern this performance improvement. We therefore have no real insight into the rules of learning itself - or how to optimize it. Very little is known about what it is that actually is trained.
In a frequency discrimination (FD) task, listeners are presented with two or more pure tones of different frequencies and are asked to distinguish them, by choosing which of two tones is higher or lower in pitch (e.g., Fig. 1 inset), by matching two same-pitched tones out of three or more, or by picking the odd one out of several choices. Each such judgment is called a trial, and training consists of many successive trials arranged into training blocks.
A decrease in the frequency difference required to discriminate the tones is indicative of learning
Fig. 1 shows typical learning curves for a FD task in adult listeners. Some of the most striking aspects of training are immediately obvious. First, FD performance is extremely variable, especially in naïve listeners. At the start of training (see block 1 in Fig. 1), the frequency difference that is needed by each listener to identify consistently the higher