Children's use of semantic cues in degraded listening environments.
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.
Fallon
Marianne
M
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto at Mississauga, Ontario, Canada.
Trehub
Sandra E
SE
Schneider
Bruce A
BA
D000328:Adult; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003463:Cues; D004777:Environment; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011897:Random Allocation; D012660:Semantics