Test of Basic Auditory Capabilities,
Modification 4 (TBAC-4)

And the National Auditory Capabilities Database (NACD)

Certain developments in the past 25 years have increased interest in auditory acuity among persons with normal sensitivity. The bulk of these have involved correlations observed between performance on certain identification or discrimination tasks and a variety of clinical conditions, including delayed language development, reading deficits, and general academic difficulties (e.g. Tallal et al., 1983). One problem with these findings has been that poor performance by children on complex tasks, whether auditory or cognitive, can have many explanations other than a frank disorder of the auditory system. A great deal of controversy has been associated with the syndromes termed Central Auditory Processing Disorders (CAPD) (see Cacace and McFarland, 2008). Determining the number and nature of specific auditory abilities among healthy young adults seemed, to the developers of the TBAC, to be the first order of business. After that is achieved, it will be possible to investigate various ways in which those measures may or may not be associated with disorders, for example those of speech perception, language development and reading. Some of that sort of work has been undertaken, however all such studies thus far conducted have examined correlations between performance on some single auditory task and measures of language development or reading, rather than working with any form of estimated auditory ability measures, such as those that may be obtained from the TBAC (Kidd et al., 2007).

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