title: Children's use of semantic cues in degraded listening environments.
abstract: Children 5 and 9 years of age and adults were required to identify the final words of low- and high-context sentences in background noise. Age-related differences in the audibility of speech signals were minimized by selecting signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) that yielded 78% correct performance for low-context sentences. As expected, children required more favorable SNRs than adults to achieve comparable levels of performance. A more difficult listening condition was generated by adding 2 dB of noise. In general, 5-year-olds performed more poorly than did 9-year-olds and adults. Listeners of all ages, however, showed comparable gains from context in both levels of noise, indicating that noise does not impede children's use of contextual cues.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Toronto at Mississauga, Ontario, Canada.
authors.forename: Marianne
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Fallon
authors.forename: Sandra E
authors.initials: SE
authors.lastname: Trehub
authors.forename: Bruce A
authors.initials: BA
authors.lastname: Schneider
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003463:Cues; D004777:Environment; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011897:Random Allocation; D012660:Semantics