Journal
JOURNAL OF THE ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA
Volume 118, Issue 5, Pages 3164-3176Publisher
ACOUSTICAL SOC AMER AMER INST PHYSICS
DOI: 10.1121/1.2082567
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- NICHD NIH HHS [R01-HD023333-14, R01 HD023333-13, R01 HD023333] Funding Source: Medline
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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. (c) 2005 Acoustical Society of America.
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