Development of speech perception under adverse listening conditions

Abstract

Speech communication success is dependent on interactions among the talker, listener, and listening environment. One such important interaction is between the listener’s age and the noise and reverberation in the environment. Previous work has demonstrated that children have greater difficulty than adults in noisy and highly reverberant environments, such as those frequently found in classrooms. I will review research that considers how a talker’s production patterns also contribute to speech comprehension, focusing on nonnative talkers. Studies from my lab have demonstrated that children have more difficulty than adults perceiving speech that deviates from native language norms, even in quiet listening conditions in which adults are highly accurate. When a nonnative talker’s voice was combined with noise, children’s word recognition was particularly poor. Therefore, similar to the developmental trajectory for speech perception in noise or reverberation, the ability to accurately perceive speech produced by nonnative talkers continues to develop well into childhood. Metrics to quantify speech intelligibility in specific rooms must consider both listener characteristics, talker characteristics, and their interaction. Future research should investigate how children’s speech comprehension is influenced by the interaction between specific types of background noise and reverberation and talker production characteristics. [Work supported by NIH-R21DC010027.]