title: Informational masking of speech in children: effects of ipsilateral and contralateral distracters.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Heuser Hearing Institute, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky 40292, USA. fred.wightman@louisville.edu
authors.forename: Frederic L
authors.initials: FL
authors.lastname: Wightman
authors.forename: Doris J
authors.initials: DJ
authors.lastname: Kistler
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010470:Perceptual Masking / Q000502:physiology*; D011594:Psychometrics; D012737:Sex Factors; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*