Abstract:
This study will be concerned with determining whether auditory discrimination is an ability which reaches its ceiling in early childhood or if it is a developmental phenomenon which peaks later in life. The investigator believes that auditory discrimination skills progressively improve with age, at least to the late teens or early twenties.In interviewing elementary classroom teachers, it became apparent that a great deal of time is devoted to auditory discrimination through phonics in the classroom in most, or all, elementary schools. The classroom teacher in all six elementary grades, and particularly the first three grades, uses phonic instruction prior to beginning reading, and later as an integral part of her language arts instruction. The teacher is dependent upon phonetic discrimination as the basic foundation in the language arts program arid, if a child does not master these basics or if he appears to be unable to master them, it is an indication that he may experience difficulty in the total language learning process.The speech therapist also devotes a significant amount of time to auditory discrimination training in the speech correction classes. This training is, in essence, a speech sound discrimination or phonetic discrimination very similar to the training given by the classroom teacher. The inability of a child to discriminate would also have an effect upon the speech or oral aspect of the language learning process.A ceiling effect in the lower elementary grades would prove to result in a rather marked change in the approach used in the language arts program, and the speech correction classes. Rather than depend upon the child's auditory perception, the teacher and speech therapist would have to utilize the strengths in the other sensory modalities, for example, visual, tactile, and kinesthetic. If each child's particular strength was determined at the beginning of his classroom instruction, then perhaps the child could be grouped according to the sensory modality to be used for instruction. In this way, perhaps, each child might reach his full learning potential.