Behavioural assessment of neonatal responses to auditory stimuli

This study was designed to analyse the responses of forty newborn infants at four age levels, ranging from 24 to 119 hours, to various auditory stimuli, with the aim of producing a simple, readily administered procedure for auditory screening. Number of hand and head movements and the amount of body, facial and visual activity were recorded by an observer for each infant under four conditions: no stimulus, pure tone, bell and speech. The patterned signals (bell and speech) elicited significantly more total responses than did the pure tone, and the number of responses in the no-stimulus condition was significantly less than in the other conditions. No significant difference was found between responses to the bell and to the speech sounds. Of the individual measures, body activity presented the most clear-cut picture, although visual and facial activity were also of interest. We conclude that the procedure employed could provide a useful assessment of auditory capacity in infants.