J. Experimental Child Psychology 91 (2005) 249–270 www.elsevier.com/locate/jecp 0022-0965/$ - see front matter  2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2005.03.004 Psychophysical design inXuences frequency discrimination performance in young children Paul SutcliVe a,¤ , Dorothy Bishop b a School of Health and Related Research, University of SheYeld, SheYeld S1 4DA, UK b Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3UD, UK Received 11 June 2003; revised 28 February 2005 Abstract We investigated how diVerent psychophysical procedures aVect frequency discrimination performance in children. Four studies used a design in which listeners heard two tone pairs and had to identify whether the Wrst or second pair contained a higher frequency target tone. Thresholds for 6- and 7-year-olds were higher than those for 8- and 9-year-olds and adults. Two manipulations led to lower (better) thresholds in young children: (a) moving the standard comparison tone before the target tone and (b) using three target comparison tone pairs. It is suggested that young children beneWt from designs that help cue them to when they need to attend to a target tone. The two-interval, forced-choice procedure that is widely used in studies of developmental disorders led to variable performance even in adults and did not give a real- istic picture of the perceptual capabilities of children under 8 years of age.  2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Frequency discrimination; Psychophysical design; Young children Introduction Nonverbal measures of auditory processing are increasingly being used to assess perceptual functions in children with reading and language diYculties, but little is * Corresponding author. Fax: +44 114 272 4095. E-mail address: p.sutcliVe@shef.ac.uk (P. SutcliVe).