ABSTRACT
The use of auditory measures to index individual differences in infancy is well established in some professional domains and virtually untested in others. For example, there has been a burgeoning of research in the past 18 years to develop measures of auditory functioning in infants that can serve to identify those with hearing dysfunction. Similarly, professionals interested in the prediction from infancy to later speech and language skills have spent years on research to identify risk factors and auditory measures useful for this purpose. By contrast, professionals interested in establishing measures to index individual differences in infants’ intellectual functioning have focused almost exclusively on measures of visual information processing. Despite the many analogous cognitive processes that occur in the visual and auditory domains (cf. Morrongiello, 1988), there is only one published report that has focused on auditory processing measures in studying individual differences in cognitive functioning in infancy (O'Connor, Cohen, & Parmelee, 1984). As discussed in this chapter, however, this is an area that seems to hold much promise for future research on individual differences in cognitive processes.
