Speech-on-speech masking for children and adults

Abstract

Children experience greater difficulty understanding speech in noise compared to adults. This age effect is pronounced when the noise causes both energetic and informational masking, for example, when listening to speech while other people are talking. As children acquire speech and language, they are faced with multi-speech environments all the time, for example, in the classroom. For adults, speech perception tends to be worse when the target and masker are matched in terms of talker sex and language, with mismatches improving performance. It is unknown, however, whether children are able to benefit from these (sex or language) target/masker mismatches. The goal of this project is to further our understanding of the speech-on-speech masking deficit children demonstrate throughout childhood, while specifically investigating whether children’s speech recognition improves when the target and masker are spoken by talkers of the opposite sex, or when the target and masker speech are spoken in different languages. Normal-hearing children and adults were tested on word identification and sentence recognition tasks. Differences in SNR needed to equate performance between the two groups will be reported, as well as data reporting whether children are able to benefit from these target/masker mismatch cues.