title: Linguistic Masking Release in School-Age Children and Adults.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  This study assessed if 6- to 8-year-old children benefit from a language mismatch between target and masker speech for sentence recognition in a 2-talker masker.
  
  
  METHODS
  English sentence recognition was evaluated for English monolingual children (ages 6-8 years, n = 15) and adults (n = 15) in an English 2-talker and a Spanish 2-talker masker. A regression analysis with subject as a random variable was used to test the fixed effect of listener group and masker language and the interaction of these two effects.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Thresholds were approximately 5 dB higher for children than for adults in both maskers. However, children and adults benefited to the same degree from a mismatch between the target and masker language with approximately 3 dB lower thresholds in the Spanish than the English masker.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Results suggest that children are able to take advantage of linguistic differences between English and Spanish speech maskers to the same degree as adults. Yet, overall worse performance for children may indicate general cognitive immaturity compared with adults, perhaps causing children to be less efficient when combining glimpses of degraded speech information into a meaningful sentence.
authors.forename: Lauren
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Calandruccio
authors.forename: Lori J
authors.initials: LJ
authors.lastname: Leibold
authors.forename: Emily
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Buss
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001309:Auditory Threshold; D002648:Child; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D012044:Regression Analysis; D059629:Signal-To-Noise Ratio; D013067:Speech Perception; D055815:Young Adult