Pitch Perception In Children: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Pitch is a psychoacoustic correlate of frequency perceived as high and low by an individual. It plays a vital role in the perception of speech and non-speech sounds (music and other emotions). It also helps in describing prosody and tonal dialects in languages such as Mandarin and Cantonese and aids in defining the word meaning. Pitch differences can aid listeners in separating and making sense of conflicting sound sources in challenging acoustic situations. The purpose of the current review was to summarize existing literature on various tests and stimuli used to assess the pitch perception ability in children with normal hearing and hearing impairment. The search for the articles began with finalizing appropriate keywords, putting those through various search engines from 2012 to 2022. The retrieved articles were assessed in two stages: title and abstract screening, followed by a full-length article review. Seven studies were finalized at the end of the search process. The review showed up-down/rising–lowering procedure, tonal contrasts, just noticeable difference (JND), pitch sweeps, lexical tone perception, direction and perception of pitch glides, and focus sentences. The tests were assessed using either one interval two alternative forced choice method (1I-2AFC) and three interval three alternative forced choice method (3I3AFC). It was noticed that when the pitch cues were unattainable for children with cochlear implants (CI), durational and amplitude cues helped to determine the stress and intonation perception. In children, F0 onset served as a cue for identifying similar contour tones. Children around eleven years show improvement in the direction of pitch discrimination as the sensitivity increases with age.