Informational Making of Speech in Children: Effects of Ipsilateral and Contralateral Distracters

• Published in: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 2005-11, Vol.118 (5), p.3164-3176
• Main Authors: Wightman, Frederic L, Kistler, Doris J
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0001-4966

Using a closed-set speech recognition paradigm thought to be heavily influenced by informational masking, auditory selective attention was measured in 38 children (ages 4-16 years) and 8 adults (ages 20-30 years). The task required attention to a monaural target speech message that was presented with a time-synchronized distracter message in the same ear. In some conditions a second distracter message or a speech-shaped noise was presented to the other ear. Compared to adults, children required higher target/distracter ratios to reach comparable performance levels, reflecting more informational masking in these listeners. Informational masking in most conditions was confirmed by the fact that a large proportion of the errors made by the listeners were contained in the distracter message(s). There was a monotonic age effect, such that even the children in the oldest age group (13.6-16 years) demonstrated poorer performance than adults. For both children and adults, presentation of an additional distracter in the contralateral ear significantly reduced performance, even when the distracter messages were produced by a talker of different sex than the target talker. The results are consistent with earlier reports from pure-tone masking studies that informational masking effects are much larger in children than in adults. [Copyright 2005 Acoustical Society of America.]