Children's speech discrimination in quiet and noise

Abstract

Normal children 5–8 years old, were tested on a new speech discrimination procedure. Stimuli were monosyllabic nouns within the receptive vocabularies of three‐year‐old inner‐city children. An up—down procedure tracked the 71% correct level of response. Open‐ and closed‐set conditions were tested. Closed‐set conditions used four‐alternative picture responses. Subjects were tested in quiet with an open response set (no pictures) and then on three closed‐set conditions: quiet, with a 12‐talker‐babble masker at 70 dB SPL, and with a filtered‐noise masker (filtered to have the same spectrum as the babble) at 70 dB SPL. Thresholds in babble were about 10 dB higher than thresholds in noise, and open‐set quiet thresholds were about 10 dB higher than closed‐set quiet thresholds. No age differences were observed. The absence of an age effect with the monosyllable stimulus items contrasts with an earlier report [L. L. Elliott, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 60, S28 A (1976)] where there was an age effect for older children tested in noise on a linguistically more complex task. [Supported by BEH.]