Lack of generalization of auditory learning in typically developing children.

Purpose To understand the components of auditory learning in typically developing children by assessing generalization across stimuli, across modalities (i.e., hearing, vision), and to higher level language tasks. Method Eighty-six 8- to 10-year-old typically developing children were quasi-randomly assigned to 4 groups. Three of the groups received twelve 30-min training sessions on multiple standards using either an auditory frequency discrimination task (AFD group), auditory phonetic discrimination task (PD group), or visual frequency discrimination task (VFD group) over 4 weeks. The 4th group, which was the no-intervention control (NI) group, did not receive any training. Thresholds on all tasks (AFD, PD, and VFD) were assessed immediately before and after training, along with performance on a battery of language assessments. Results Relative to the other groups, both the AFD group and the PD group, but not the VFD group, showed significant learning on the stimuli upon which they were trained. However,...