Speech Recognition in Noise and Reverberation by School-Age Children

Speech intelligibility and spatial release from masking in young children

“…Although extensively studied in adults, to date this area of research has been minimal in children. This study may therefore be helpful towards improving our understanding of children's ability to hear and learn in noisy and reverberant environments, especially given that such abilities are known to be compromised compared with abilities measured under quiet condition ͑e.g., ANSI, 2002;Yacullo and Hawkins, 1987;Knecht et al, 2002͒. The results can be summarized as follows: ͑1͒ Adults' SRTs were lower than those of the children for all conditions. ͑2͒ For both age groups masking was significantly greater with speech-noise than with speech and with two competitors compared with one.…”

“…In addition to voices of adults and children, instructional aids, environmental sounds, and reverberation are standard aspects of acoustic environments in classrooms. Some work indicates that children learn best in relatively quiet environments, and often have difficulty hearing speech in the presence of distracting sounds ͑Crandell, 1993; Yacullo and Hawkins, 1987;Papso and Blood, 1989͒. Psychophysical studies in which stimuli were presented over headphones have shown that, compared with adults, preschool listeners exhibit poorer attentional selectivity on auditory tasks ͑e.g., Stellmack et al, 1997;Oh et al, 2001͒ andreduced unmasking for tone detection under dichotic conditions ͑Wightman et al, 2003;Hall et al, 2004͒. Also under headphones, it has been found that in the presence of two-talker maskers speech reception thresholds are higher in children than adults, and for both age groups thresholds are higher in the presence of two-talker maskers than with speech-shaped noise maskers ͑Hall et al, 2002͒.…”

Combined Effects of Noise and Reverberation on Speech Recognition Performance of Normal-Hearing Children and Adults

“…Yacullo and Hawkins (1987) tested 8-to 10-yr-old children using sentence material and a 12-talker babble. Testing was carried out monaurally under anechoic conditions and in a small classroom (90 m 3 ) with a mean reverberation time of 0.81 sec at SNRs of ϩ2 and ϩ6 dB.…”

“…In addition, because testing was performed monaurally, the results may overestimate reverberation and noise effects. Yacullo and Hawkins (1987) also focused on monaural speech recognition of 8-and 9-yr-old children (recognition of words in sentences) under reverberant (anechoic and RT 60 ϭ 0.8 sec) and multitalker babble noise (SNR ϭ ϩ2 and ϩ6 dB). The limited set of data revealed significant decreases in performance with reverberation and with increasing noise, as well as a significant interaction effect, but again the reverberation time exceeds the ANSI recommendation and focuses on poorer SNRs than the recommended.…”

Development of Spatial Release From Masking in Mandarin-Speaking Children With Normal Hearing

“…Children's learning through the auditory channel is optimal if the auditory signal is free from noise and distracting sounds (Crandell, 1993;Papso & Blood, 1989;Yacullo & Hawkins, 1987). However, children rarely learn in a quiet environment.…”