title: Linguistically-based informational masking in preschool children.
abstract: Previous work has shown that young children exhibit more difficulty understanding speech in the presence of speech-like distractors than do adults, and are more susceptible to at least some form of informational masking (IM). Yet little is known about how/when the "susceptibility" to linguistically-based IM develops. The authors tested adults, school-age children (aged 8 yrs), and preschool-age children (aged 4 yrs) on sentence recognition in the presence of normal speech, "jumbled" speech, and reversed speech distractors. As has been found previously with adults [e.g., Summers and Molis (2004). J. Speech, Lang. Hear. Res. 47, 245-256], children in both age groups showed a release of masking when the distractor was uninterpretable (reversed speech). This suggests that children already demonstrate linguistically-based IM by the age of 4 yrs.
authors.affiliation: Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, University of Maryland, 0100 Lefrak Hall, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA rnewman1@umd.edu, gmorini@umd.edu, farazahsan95@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Rochelle S
authors.initials: RS
authors.lastname: Newman
authors.affiliation: Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, University of Maryland, 0100 Lefrak Hall, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA rnewman1@umd.edu, gmorini@umd.edu, farazahsan95@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Giovanna
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Morini
authors.affiliation: Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, University of Maryland, 0100 Lefrak Hall, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA rnewman1@umd.edu, gmorini@umd.edu, farazahsan95@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Faraz
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Ahsan
authors.affiliation: Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, Boston University, 635 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, USA gkidd@bu.edu.
authors.forename: Gerald
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Kidd
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D010470:Perceptual Masking / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*