The effects of early auditory deprivation on temporal perceptions: a comparison of hearing and hearing-impaired children on temporal pattern matching tasks.

This study was designed to test the hypothesis that hearing children, but not children deprived of early auditory experiences, would use an auditory frame of reference, or auditory encoding, for temporal perceptions. Two age groups (8 and 11 years of age) of hearing and hearing-impaired children were tested in two sessions; tasks required each child to decide whether two temporal patterns (sequences of lights, sounds or both) were the same or different. Specific trial-types were designed to reveal different patterns of performances (across trial-types) for children who differed in terms of whether an auditory frame of reference was used. The results suggested that all children used similar temporal frames of reference, but that hearing-impaired children demonstrated developmental lags.