Development of auditory scene analysis: a mini-review
DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2024.1352247
archive: archived pipeline: cataloged verified
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Summary
This mini-review examines the developmental trajectory of auditory scene analysis (ASA), the cognitive process by which listeners segregate mixed sound waves into distinct streams and selectively attend to relevant information. The author addresses a gap in existing literature, which has historically focused on either sequential or simultaneous ASA in isolation, by synthesizing recent behavioral and neurophysiological studies on non-linguistic stimuli. The review aims to clarify how these mechanisms develop from infancy through adolescence, identifying specific acoustic cues used by children and the impact of sensorineural hearing loss. The paper analyzes studies utilizing canonical paradigms, including sequential tone sequences, simultaneous mistuned complex tones, and stochastic tone clouds. Behavioral measures assess detection thresholds and stream segregation accuracy, while neurophysiological data rely on event-related potentials such as the mismatch negativity (MMN) for sequential processing and the object-related negativity (ORN) for simultaneous processing. The review covers participants ranging from newborns to adults, comparing developmental milestones across these age groups. Findings indicate that the neural mechanisms for both sequential and simultaneous stream segregation are functional from birth, though their efficiency improves throughout childhood and adolescence. Behavioral performance in sequential streaming matures earlier than simultaneous streaming, which requires larger frequency separations in children than in adults. Regarding selective attention, infants as young as six months can orient attention using temporal cues, but full maturity in selective auditory attention amidst interfering streams is not reached until late childhood. Neurophysiological markers of attention, however, continue to mature into adolescence. The review also highlights that congenital hearing loss impairs the central processing of simultaneous streams, resulting in smaller and delayed ORN responses compared to hearing peers. The significance of this work lies in its identification of discrepancies between behavioral maturity and neural maturation, suggesting that children may recruit different cognitive resources to achieve adult-like performance. The author argues for the adoption of ecological paradigms, such as stochastic figure-ground tasks, to study combined sequential and simultaneous ASA, which better reflects real-world listening conditions. Understanding these developmental trajectories is crucial for addressing the challenges children face in noisy environments, such as classrooms, and for supporting clinical populations with hearing impairments.
Provenance
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| Stage | Outcome | Tool | Model | Prompt | Attempts | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discover | success | OpenAlex-citations | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-17 |
| archive | success | unpaywall | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-25 |
| extract | success | cached | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-25 |
| clean | success | clean | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-18 |
| chunk | success | chunk | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-18 |
| embed | success | embed | Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B | — | 1 | 2026-06-18 |
| promote | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-17 |
| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant | summ-v5 | 1 | 2026-06-25 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 6 | 2026-06-18 |
| verify | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-26 |
Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-25; verification: verified.
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