Reduced processing efficiency impacts auditory detection of amplitude modulation in children: Evidence from an experimental and modeling study

Auditory detection of the Amplitude Modulation (AM) of sounds, crucial for speech perception, improves until 10 years of age. This protracted development may not only be explained by sensory maturation, but also by improvements in processing efficiency: the ability to make efficient use of available sensory information. This hypothesis was tested behaviorally on 86 6-to-9-year-olds and 15 adults using AM-detection tasks assessing absolute sensitivity, masking, and response consistency in the AM domain. Absolute sensitivity was estimated by the detection thresholds of a sinusoidal AM applied to a pure-tone carrier; AM masking was estimated as the elevation of AM-detection thresholds produced when replacing the pure-tone carrier by a narrowband noise; response consistency was estimated using a double-pass paradigm where the same set of stimuli was presented twice. Results showed that AM sensitivity improved from childhood to adulthood, but did not change between 6 and 9 years. AM masking did not change with age, suggesting that the selectivity of perceptual AM filters was adult-like by 6 years. However, response consistency increased developmentally, supporting the hypothesis of reduced processing efficiency in early childhood. At the group level, double-pass data of children and adults were well simulated by a model of the human auditory system assuming a higher level of internal noise for children. At the individual level, for both children and adults, double-pass data were better simulated when assuming a suboptimal decision strategy in addition to differences in internal noise. In conclusion, processing efficiency for AM detection is reduced in childhood. Moreover, worse AM detection was linked to both systematic and stochastic inefficiencies, in both children and adults.