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

Abstract

The present study set out to test whether greater susceptibility to modulation masking could be responsible for immature recognition of speech in noise for school-age children. Listeners were normal-hearing four- to ten-year-olds and adults. Target sentences were filtered into 28 adjacent narrow bands (100-7800 Hz), and the masker was either spectrally matched noise bands or tones centered on each of the speech bands. In experiment 1, odd- and even-numbered bands of target-plus-masker were presented to opposite ears. Performance improved with child age in all conditions, but this improvement was larger for the multi-tone than the multi-noise-band masker. This outcome is contrary to the expectation that children are more susceptible than adults to masking produced by inherent modulation of the noise masker. In experiment 2, odd-numbered bands were presented to both ears, with the masker diotic and the target either diotic or binaurally out of phase. The binaural difference cue was particularly beneficial for young children tested in the multi-tone masker, suggesting that development of auditory stream segregation may play a role in the child-adult difference for this condition. Overall, results provide no evidence of greater susceptibility to modulation masking in children than adults.

Development of temporal auditory processing in childhood: Changes in efficiency rather than temporal-modulation selectivity

“…Furthermore, computational modelling was used to predict the AM detection data. A recent study assessed the intelligibility of narrow bands of speech presented against spectrally overlapping pure tones or narrowband noises and showed no evidence of greater susceptibility to AM masking in children than adults (Buss, Leibold, and Lorenzi, 2018). Still, the necessity to interpret AM masking data in light of computer modelling results motivated the present study in its aim to tease apart the role of sensory vs efficiency factors involved in AM processing development.…”

Amplitude modulation detection and modulation masking in school-age children and adults

“…It has been proposed that speech-in-noise recognition in adults may be affected by both on-frequency (Stone et al, 2011;Stone et al, 2012;Stone and Moore, 2014) and offfrequency modulation masking (Apoux and Bacon, 2008). This has led to speculation that susceptibility to modulation masking in children could play a role in the child-adult difference observed for speech in noise (Buss et al, 2018). In the present study, there was evidence of a child-adult difference for 16-Hz AM detection with an off-frequency masker (experiment 1) but not with an on-frequency masker (experiment 2).…”

“…Results of a recent study designed to evaluate the effect of modulation masking for speech in noise recognition by children and adults failed to find support for the idea that modulation masking is responsible for the child-adult difference for speech-in-noise recognition. Buss et al (2018) measured masked sentence recognition for narrow bands of speech masked by either spectrally overlapping bands of noise or pure tones centered on each speech band. As previously observed by Stone et al (2012), adults' thresholds were lower for the multi-tone masker than for the multinoise-band masker.…”

“…However, the opposite effect was observed-there were smaller child-adult differences for the multi-noise-band than for the multi-tone masker. Buss et al (2018) argued that the large child-adult difference for the multi-tone masker reflects children's reduced ability to selectively attend to the frequency regions associated with the best SNR. This effect would be seen in the multi-tone but not the multi-noise-band masker conditions due to the greater differences in SNR across frequency in the former than the latter condition.…”

“…Factors proposed to account for the development of speech-in-noise recognition include selective attention, cognitive abilities, and linguistic knowledge (e.g., McCreery et al, 2017), but there is still no consensus regarding the relative contributions of these factors. Greater susceptibility to modulation masking in children was recently proposed as a possible contributor to the development of speech-in-noise recognition (Buss et al, 2018). This would occur if the inherent modulation of a noise masker had a larger detrimental effect on children than adults.…”