Factors affecting the development of speech recognition in steady and modulated noise

Abstract

This study used a checkerboard-masking paradigm to investigate the development of the speech reception threshold (SRT) for monosyllabic words in synchronously and asynchronously modulated noise. In asynchronous modulation, masker frequencies below 1300 Hz were gated off when frequencies above 1300 Hz were gated on, and vice versa. The goals of the study were to examine development of the ability to use asynchronous spectro-temporal cues for speech recognition and to assess factors related to speech frequency region and audible speech bandwidth. A speech-shaped noise masker was steady or was modulated synchronously or asynchronously across frequency. Target words were presented to 5-7 year old children or to adults. Overall, children showed higher SRTs and smaller masking release than adults. Consideration of the present results along with previous findings supports the idea that children can have particularly poor masked SRTs when the speech and masker spectra differ substantially, and that this may arise due to children requiring a wider speech bandwidth than adults for speech recognition. The results were also consistent with the idea that children are relatively poor in integrating speech cues when the frequency regions with the best signal-to-noise ratios vary across frequency as a function of time.

Modulation masking release reduction as a function of time-compressed speech

“…For normal hearing subjects, the higher the SNR, the smaller the MMR. Hence, different slopes of speech recognition psychometric curves in steady and modulated noise can explain by the fact that normal hearing subjects have a reduced MMR 13,14 . This happens because of increasing in SNR in relation to decreasing in speech redundancy -as observed in this study, in which the speech time-compression level was manipulated.…”

Age Dependence of Thresholds for Speech in Noise in Normal-Hearing Adolescents

“…Given the difference between child and adult perception, progressive improvement in SRT as seen in our data can be expected from childhood to adulthood. Younger listeners require a wider bandwidth to perform comparably with adults in speech identification tasks ( Eisenberg, Shannon, Martinez, Wygonski, & Boothroyd, 2000 ; Hall et al., 2016 ). With the age effect depending on the spectral match between noise masker and speech stimuli, the low-pass filtered masker of the Oorcheck probably accentuated the performance differences between teenagers and adults in comparison to a speech-shaped masker.…”

“…There is well-documented evidence that normal-hearing (NH) children aged 5 to 12 years differ from adults in speech recognition performance ( Hall, Buss, & Grose, 2016 ; Neuman, Wroblewski, Hajicek, & Rubinstein, 2010 ). The few studies on speech recognition during adolescence differ in stimuli and masker conditions.…”

Building on the Academic Legacy of Pat Stelmachowicz and other Pioneers in Developmental Psychoacoustics and Pediatric Audiology: The Children's English/Spanish Speech Recognition Test (ChEgSS)

“…For children with hearing loss, the speech audibility required to support recognition falls with increasing child age. 11 For children with normal hearing, introducing amplitude modulation to a noise masker benefits recognition less for young school-age children than for adults, 12 a result attributed to immature ability to recognize speech based on temporally sparse speech cues. This effect likely also contributes to children's increased susceptibility to maskers composed of competing speech, a situation that is common in natural listening environments.…”