Hi class,

What are the neurological foundations of audition? What is the importance of audition in
language comprehension?
Sound waves from the outside enter a person's auditory canal, where the ear drums vibrate and
the auditory ossicles pick up these oscillations and are transferred to the cochlea via the hair
cells. The cochlear or cranial nerve picks up the vibration and sends the information to the
medulla. The signal is then again relayed to the inferior colliculus where it then travels to the
brain. The data is sent to the auditory cortex in the temporal lobe, past the MGB (Carlson, 2013).
The data is then processed and registered as sound.
Audition is very important because it is how infants learn how to learn spoken language.
Newborns are always checked for hearing issues, because sound patterns heard by newborns in
their infancy determine their speed of learning. People who are hearing impaired have a different
type of speech, different in duration, pitch, and intonation. If an infant cannot hear properly,
his/her auditory cortex is not saturated with sound patterns of basic things in life. Ultimately, the
child's ability to mimic sound patterns and start to speed will be delayed extensively since the
child is working off a blank auditory cortex.
Reference
Carlson, N. R. (2013). Physiology of behavior. (11th ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.