Copyright © American Speech-Language-Hearing Association From: Speech Perception in Complex Acoustic Environments: Developmental Effects J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2017;60(10):3001-3008. doi:10.1044/2017_JSLHR-H-17-0070 Legend: This illustration highlights three stages of auditory processing. In the first stage, a combination of acoustic waveforms produced by three sources (a science teacher, students working on a project, the pump and filter of an aquarium) reaches the child's ear. In the second stage, represented as a spectrogram, the peripheral auditory system encodes the temporal, spectral, and intensity characteristics of these waveforms into a pattern of neural activity across auditory nerve fibers that is transmitted to higher levels within the auditory system. In the third stage, top-down auditory-perceptual, cognitive, and linguistic processing facilitate reconstruction of the auditory scene. Date of download: 11/7/2017 Copyright © American Speech-Language-Hearing Association