Children’s perception of speech in reverberation

Abstract

Recordings of nonsense syllables (VCV construction) were presented to groups of children aged 5, 7, 9, 11, and 13 years and young adults under monaural (reverberation time = 0.6s) and binaural (reverberation times = 0, 0.4, and 0.6 s) conditions of reverberation. Phoneme identification performance was affected by age, reverberation, and mode of presentation (monaural versus binaural). The major findings were (1) phoneme identification scores in reverberant conditions improved with increasing age and decreased with increased reverberation time; (2) children's performance in reverberant conditions did not reach asymptote until age 13; (3) binaural performance was consistently better than monaural performance for all age groups, with 5-year-olds showing the largest binaural advantage.

Chinese Word Identification and Sentence Intelligibility in Primary School Classrooms

“…Sentence intelligibility test requires children to extract both word and semantic information from the test speech signal, as well as acoustical information. In the present study, the age of grade 3 and grade 5 students was from 8 to 11 years old, however, their auditory function, which gradually develops with the age, may not mature until 13 to 15 years old (Neuman, 1983). Younger children are less able to use stored phonological knowledge to reconstruct degraded speech input by reverberation and noise than older children and adults.…”

“…In general, listeners can utilize different sources of knowledge about the structure of spoken language, including phonological, prosodic, lexical, semantic, syntactic, and situational, to constrain word choice. However, the age and language background (literacy) of children could affect children's speech identification in a room (Neuman, 1983). Sentence intelligibility test requires children to extract both word and semantic information from the test speech signal, as well as acoustical information.…”

Noise as a Public Health Problem: Proceedings of the International Congress (4th) Held at Turin (Italy) on June 21-25, 1983. Volume 1.

“…1 -Speech perception of children in noise (adapted from and in reverberation (adapted from Neuman and Hochberg, 1983). and in the right panel from Neuman and Hochberg (1983).…”

“…The stimuli used by Neuman and Hochberg (1983) were in a form of vowel-consonant-vowel disyllables in which each of three vowels /i/, /a/, and /u/ was combined with each of 19 consonants (all consonants with the exception of the semi-vowels).…”

Implementing two treatment approaches to childhood dysarthria

“…Nonsense words are used in order to glean information about vowel production without the infl uence of lexical effects (Neuman & Hochberg, 1983). This also readily permits the targeted speech sounds to be produced in consistent phonological contexts and, thus, not be infl uenced differentially by co-articulation (Hillenbrand, Clark, & Nearey, 2001;Levy, 2009).…”