Masked Speech Recognition in School-Age Children

Lori J Leibold,Emily Buss

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01981

Abstract

Children who are typically developing often struggle to hear and understand speech in the presence of competing background sounds, particularly when the background sounds are also speech. For example, in many cases, young school-age children require an additional 5- to 10-dB signal-to-noise ratio relative to adults to achieve the same word or sentence recognition performance in the presence of two streams of competing speech. Moreover, adult-like performance is not observed until adolescence. Despite ample converging evidence that children are more susceptible to auditory masking than adults, the field lacks a comprehensive model that accounts for the development of masked speech recognition. This review provides a synthesis of the literature on the typical development of masked speech recognition. Age-related changes in the ability to recognize phonemes, words, or sentences in the presence of competing background sounds will be discussed by considering (1) how masking sounds influence the sensory encoding of target speech; (2) differences in the time course of development for speech-in-noise versus speech-in-speech recognition; and (3) the central auditory and cognitive processes required to separate and attend to target speech when multiple people are speaking at the same time.

Highlights

Children must learn how to communicate in noisy environments such as classrooms (e.g., Knecht et al, 2002)
Data summarized in this review provide compelling evidence that the ability to recognize masked speech follows a prolonged time course of development
Children have more difficulty recognizing speech in the presence of background sounds relative to adults, with age effects reported for a wide range of stimuli and listening conditions

Summary

Introduction

Children must learn how to communicate in noisy environments such as classrooms (e.g., Knecht et al, 2002). Children’s increased susceptibility to auditory masking relative to adults in the context of speech recognition is more pronounced and prolonged when the masker is speech than when the masker is steady-state noise (e.g., Hall et al, 2002; Corbin et al, 2016). These results have collectively had significant impact on public health policy, leading to the establishment of classroom standards for noise levels (ANSI, 2010) as well as recommendations that speech-in-noise testing be included in the pediatric audiology test battery

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