title: Toddlers' comprehension of degraded signals: Noise-vocoded versus sine-wave analogs.
abstract: Recent findings suggest that development changes the ability to comprehend degraded speech. Preschool children showed greater difficulties perceiving noise-vocoded speech (a signal that integrates amplitude over broad frequency bands) than sine-wave speech (which maintains the spectral peaks without the spectrum envelope). In contrast, 27-month-old children in the present study could recognize speech with either type of degradation and performed slightly better with eight-channel vocoded speech than with sine-wave speech. This suggests that children's identification performance depends critically on the degree of degradation and that their success in recognizing unfamiliar speech encodings is encouraging overall.
authors.affiliation: Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, 0100 Lefrak Hall, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA Rnewman1@umd.edu.
authors.forename: Rochelle S
authors.initials: RS
authors.lastname: Newman
authors.affiliation: Boys Town National Research Hospital, 555 North 30th Street, Omaha, Nebraska 68131, USA monita.chatterjee@boystown.org.
authors.forename: Monita
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Chatterjee
authors.affiliation: Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, 0100 Lefrak Hall, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA gmorini@udel.edu.
authors.forename: Giovanna
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Morini
authors.affiliation: Barnard College, Columbia University, 3009 Broadway, New York, New York 10027, USA remez@columbia.edu.
authors.forename: Robert E
authors.initials: RE
authors.lastname: Remez
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation / Q000379:methods*; D000162:Acoustics; D000367:Age Factors; D001302:Audiometry, Speech; D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D032882:Comprehension; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013065:Speech Intelligibility; D013067:Speech Perception