title: Lexical and age effects on word recognition in noise in normal-hearing children.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  The purposes of the present study were (1) to examine the lexical and age effects on word recognition of normal-hearing (NH) children in noise, and (2) to compare the word-recognition performance in noise to that in quiet listening conditions.
  
  
  METHODS
  Participants were 213 NH children (age ranged between 3 and 6 years old). Eighty-nine and 124 of the participants were tested in noise and quiet listening conditions, respectively. The Standard-Chinese Lexical Neighborhood Test, which contains lists of words in four lexical categories (i.e., dissyllablic easy (DE), dissyllablic hard (DH), monosyllable easy (ME), and monosyllable hard (MH)) was used to evaluate the Mandarin Chinese word recognition in speech spectrum-shaped noise (SSN) with a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 0dB. A two-way repeated-measures analysis of variance was conducted to examine the lexical effects with syllable length and difficulty level as the main factors on word recognition in the quiet and noise listening conditions. The effects of age on word-recognition performance were examined using a regression model.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The word-recognition performance in noise was significantly poorer than that in quiet and the individual variations in performance in noise were much greater than those in quiet. Word recognition scores showed that the lexical effects were significant in the SSN. Children scored higher with dissyllabic words than with monosyllabic words; "easy" words scored higher than "hard" words in the noise condition. The scores of the NH children in the SSN (SNR=0dB) for the DE, DH, ME, and MH words were 85.4, 65.9, 71.7, and 46.2% correct, respectively. The word-recognition performance also increased with age in each lexical category for the NH children tested in noise.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Both age and lexical characteristics of words had significant influences on the performance of Mandarin-Chinese word recognition in noise. The lexical effects were more obvious under noise listening conditions than in quiet. The word-recognition performance in noise increased with age in NH children of 3-6 years old and had not reached plateau at 6 years of age in the NH children.
authors.affiliation: Beijing Tongren Hospital, Beijing Institute of Otolaryngology, Capital Medical University, Beijing, PR China.
authors.forename: Cuncun
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Ren
authors.affiliation: Beijing Tongren Hospital, Beijing Institute of Otolaryngology, Capital Medical University, Beijing, PR China. Electronic address: liusha_liu@126.com.
authors.forename: Sha
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Beijing Children Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing, PR China.
authors.forename: Haihong
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Beijing Tongren Hospital, Beijing Institute of Otolaryngology, Capital Medical University, Beijing, PR China.
authors.forename: Ying
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Kong
authors.affiliation: Beijing Tongren Hospital, Beijing Institute of Otolaryngology, Capital Medical University, Beijing, PR China.
authors.forename: Xin
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Beijing Tongren Hospital, Beijing Institute of Otolaryngology, Capital Medical University, Beijing, PR China.
authors.forename: Shujing
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Li
mesh_terms: D000367:Age Factors; D001307:Auditory Perception; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D009622:Noise; D059629:Signal-To-Noise Ratio; D013060:Speech; D013067:Speech Perception
keywords: Children; Mandarin Chinese; Noise; Word recognition