Developmental aspects of auditory cognition were investigated in 5-to-10-year-old
children (n = 100). Musical and verbal short-term memory (STM) were assessed by
means of delayed matching-to-sample tasks (DMST) (comparison of two four-item
sequences separated by a silent retention delay),with two levels of difficulty. For musical
and verbal materials, children’s performance increased from 5 years to about 7
years of age, then remained stable up to 10 years of age, with performance remaining
inferior to performance of young adults. Children and adults performed betterwith
verbal material than with musical material. To investigate auditory cognition beyond
STM, we assessed speech-in-noise perception with a four-alternative forced-choice
task with two conditions of phonological difficulty and two levels of cocktail-party
noise intensity. Partial correlations, factoring out the effect of age, showed a significant
link between musical STM and speech-in-noise perception in the condition with
increased noise intensity. Our findings reveal that auditory STM improves over development
with a critical phase around 6–7 years of age, yet these abilities appear to be
still immature at 10 years. Musical and verbalSTMmight in particular share procedural
and serial order processes. Furthermore, musical STM and the ability to perceive relevant
speech signals in cocktail-party noise might rely on shared cognitive resources,
possibly related to pitch encoding. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time
that auditory STM is assessed with the same paradigm for musical and verbal material
during childhood, providing perspectives regarding diagnosis and remediation in developmental
learning disorders.
Development of auditory cognition in 5- to 10-year-old children: Focus on musical and verbal short-term memory
