Do age and linguistic background alter the audiovisual advantage when listening to speech in the presence of energetic and informational masking?

We examined how the type of masker presented in the background affected the extent to which visual information enhanced speech recognition, and whether the effect was dependent on or independent of age and linguistic competence. In the present study, young speakers of English as a first language (YEL1) and English as a second language (YEL2), as well as older speakers of English as a first language (OEL1), were asked to complete an audio (A) and an audiovisual (AV) speech recognition task in which they listened to anomalous target sentences presented against a background of one of three masker types (noise, babble, and competing speech). All three main effects were found to be statistically significant (group, masker type, A vs. AV presentation type). Interesting two-way interactions were found between masker type and group and between masker type and presentation type; however, no interactions were found between group (age and/or linguistic competence) and presentation type (A vs. AV). The results of this study, while they shed light on the effect of masker type on the AV advantage, suggest that age and linguistic competence have no significant effects on the extent to which a listener is able to use visual information to improve speech recognition in background noise.