Masked Speech Recognition in School-Age Children

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Lori J. Leibold¹  Emily Buss² 

[1] Human Auditory Development Laboratory, Department of Research, Center for Hearing Research, Boys Town National Research Hospital, United States;Psychoacoustics Laboratories, Department of Otolaryngology/Head and Neck Surgery, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, United States

关键词: development;    children;    hearing;    speech perception;    masking;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01981

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Children who are typically developing often struggle to hear and understand speech in the presence of competing background sounds, particularly when the background sounds are also speech. For example, in many cases, young school-age children require an additional 5- to 10-dB signal-to-noise ratio relative to adults to achieve the same word or sentence recognition performance in the presence of two streams of competing speech. Moreover, adult-like performance is not observed until adolescence. Despite ample converging evidence that children are more susceptible to auditory masking than adults, the field lacks a comprehensive model that accounts for the development of masked speech recognition. This review provides a synthesis of the literature on the typical development of masked speech recognition. Age-related changes in the ability to recognize phonemes, words, or sentences in the presence of competing background sounds will be discussed by considering (1) how masking sounds influence the sensory encoding of target speech; (2) differences in the time course of development for speech-in-noise versus speech-in-speech recognition; and (3) the central auditory and cognitive processes required to separate and attend to target speech when multiple people are speaking at the same time.

【 授权许可】

CC BY