Children's Identification of Consonants in a Speech-Shaped Noise or a Two-Talker Masker

Abstract

Purpose This study evaluated child-adult differences for consonant identification in a noise or a two-talker masker. Error patterns were compared across age and masker type to test the hypothesis that errors with the noise masker reflect limitations in the peripheral encoding of speech, whereas errors with the two-talker masker reflect target-masker confusions within the central auditory system. Method A repeated-measures design compared the performance of children (5–13 years) and adults in continuous speech-shaped noise or a two-talker masker. Consonants were identified from a closed set of 12 using a picture-pointing response. Results In speech-shaped noise, children under 10 years of age performed more poorly than adults, but performance was adult-like for 11- to 13-year-olds. In the two-talker masker significant child-adult differences were observed in even the oldest group of children. Systematic clusters of consonant errors were observed for children in the noise masker and for adults in both maskers, but not for children in the two-talker masker. Conclusions These results suggest a more prolonged time course of development for consonant identification in a two-talker than in a noise masker. Differences in error patterns between the maskers support the hypothesis that errors with the two-talker masker reflect failures of sound segregation.

Speech recognition in one- and two-talker maskers in school-age children and adults: Development of perceptual masking and glimpsing

“…Large child/adult differences have been observed for closed-set VCV recognition (Leibold and Buss, 2013), open-and closed-set word recognition Corbin et al, 2016;Hall et al, 2002), and sentence recognition (Wightman and Kistler, 2005). Development of speech-in-speech recognition appears to continue into adolescence (Corbin et al, 2016;Wightman and Kistler, 2005).…”

“…This type of error is sometimes described as an intrusion from the masker stream. Several studies showing poor speech-in-speech recognition in children have also reported evidence of more intrusions in children's responses (Leibold and Buss, 2013;Wightman and Kistler, 2005), suggesting that their poor performance may be due to a failure of stream segregation and/or a failure to selectively attend to the target stream.…”

Development and Preliminary Evaluation of a Pediatric Spanish–English Speech Perception Task

“…This time course of development appears to extend longer into childhood when the competing background sounds are made up of a small number of competing talkers than when the competing background is steady-state noise (e.g., Bonino et al, 2013; Leibold & Buss, 2013; Wightman & Kistler, 2005). That is, preschoolers and kindergarteners are often more susceptible to interference from complex sounds than older children.…”

Investigating the acoustics of a sample of open plan and enclosed Kindergarten classrooms in Australia

“…This reduces the resources available for linguistic and cognitive processing and can often result in children 'tuning out' from being overloaded by auditory stimuli [5,38]. Noise levels are reported to be highest in the classrooms of the youngest children [25,33,47,59] which is also the age group most affected [26,32,43,45]. As children's auditory systems are neurologically immature, they have greater perceptual difficulties than adults in discriminating and understanding speech, and cannot use years of previous communicative experience to fill in missing information [58].…”