Development of Selective Auditory Attention Skills in Children

This study investigated the development of selective auditory attention skills of 53 children and 5 through 9 yr. old. Each child was tested individually via headphones at a comfortable listening level. The task required pointing to the appropriate picture of a monosyllabic word presented diotically. The task was presented first in quiet and then under each of three noise (distractor) conditions, white noise (nonlinguistic), speech backwards (linguistic nonsemantic), a speech forward (semantic). Age and type of distractor significantly influenced test scores. The semantic distractor caused the greatest distraction for all children.