The role of attention in listening-in-noise

Abstract

Listeners of all ages are faced with having to understand speech in the presence of noise. One factor that might influence listeners' success at this task is their ability to attend selectively. We examine both adults' and toddlers' understanding of speech in the presence of nonlinguistic background noise – noise that is either easier or harder to attend to selectively. We also test the same individuals on a nonlinguistic selective attention task. Adult listeners easily take advantage of acoustic cues such as spatial location and frequency-range differences to help them attend selectively to, and comprehend, the target speech. Young toddlers (under 2 years of age) fail to use these cues. In addition, among adults, success at listening in noise is correlated with performance in a visual selective attention task, suggesting that domain-general attention skills are relevant for adults' listening in noise. This is less clearly the case for young children, however; indeed, children who were more easily distracted by extraneous sounds showed better speech understanding in noise. These findings suggest that the relationship between performance in challenging listening conditions and other cognitive skills undergoes critical changes across development.