Effect of response context and masker type on word recognition in school-age children and adults

Abstract

In adults, masked speech recognition improves with the provision of a closed set of response alternatives. The present study evaluated whether school-age children (5-13 years) benefit to the same extent as adults from a forced-choice context, and whether this effect depends on masker type. Experiment 1 compared masked speech reception thresholds for disyllabic words in either an openset or a four-alternative forced-choice (4AFC) task. Maskers were speech-shaped noise or twotalker speech. Experiment 2 compared masked speech reception thresholds for monosyllabic words in two 4AFC tasks, one in which the target and foils were phonetically similar and one in which they were dissimilar. Maskers were speech-shaped noise, amplitude-modulated noise, or two-talker speech. For both experiments, it was predicted that children would not benefit from the information provided by the 4AFC context to the same degree as adults, particularly when the masker was complex (two-talker) or when audible speech cues were temporally sparse (modulated-noise). Results indicate that young children do benefit from a 4AFC context to the same extent as adults in speechshaped noise and amplitude-modulated noise, but the benefit of context increases with listener age for the two-talker speech masker.

Spatial Release From Masking in 2-Year-Olds With Normal Hearing and With Bilateral Cochlear Implants

“…Such top-down repair or restoration may enhance speech understanding in noisy environments, but the extent to which children in this study used such context effects is unclear. Buss, Leibold, and Hall (2016) investigated release from masking in children as young as 5 years of age and found that with a female target and female masker, children used context less than adults. The effect may have been limited in that study because same-sex target and masker stimuli may have invoked a high level of informational masking, but the relationship between contextual restoration and informational masking is not known.…”

Speech recognition for school-age children and adults tested in multi-tone vs multi-noise-band maskers

“…Speech perception is more adversely affected by the presence of masking noise in young children than adults. This effect has been demonstrated for sentence recognition (Elliott, 1979;Stuart, 2008), open-set word recognition (Buss et al, 2016;Corbin et al, 2016), closed-set word recognition (Elliott et al, 1979;Hall et al, 2002;Buss et al, 2016), and phoneme discrimination (Leibold and Buss, 2013). Considering data across studies, speech in noise appears to be adult-like by approximately 10-12 years of age (Stuart, 2008;Corbin et al, 2016).…”

“…Compared to adults, children require greater audibility (Scollie, 2008;McCreery and Stelmachowicz, 2011) and greater spectral resolution (Eisenberg et al, 2000) to recognize speech. Age effects in the quantity or quality of cues required to recognize speech may also be responsible for the observation that children tend to benefit less than adults from amplitude modulating a noise masker (Hall et al, 2012;Buss et al, 2016). Amplitude modulating a noise masker provides the listener with brief glimpses of the target speech at an improved target-to-masker ratio (TMR), resulting in improved intelligibility compared to an unmodulated noise masker.…”

“…Another factor that could limit children's ability to recognize speech in noise is immature auditory stream segregation and/or selective attention, resulting in greater informational masking. The child-adult difference in susceptibility to masking is larger for speech-in-speech recognition than for speech-in-noise recognition (Wightman and Kistler, 2005;Buss et al, 2016;Corbin et al, 2016). The marked age effect for speech-in-speech tasks has been attributed to a) Electronic mail: ebuss@med.unc.edu development in the ability to segregate target speech from a complex background (Wightman and Kistler, 2005).…”

The Influence of Target and Masker Characteristics on Infants' and Adults' Detection of Speech

“…In contrast to masker differences, the influence of the chosen target speech material on masking has received little attention (but see Buss et al, 2016). When different targets, such as vowels, syllables, words, or sentences, are presented in the same masker, the spectrotemporal structure of the targets may influence the ability to separate the target from the competing sounds.…”