Speech-In-Speech Recognition And Spatially Selective Attention In Children And Adults

Purpose: Knowing target location can improve adults' speech in-speech recognition in complex auditory environments, but it is unknown whether young children listen selectively in space. This study evaluated masked word recognition with and without a pretrial cue to location to characterize the influence of listener age and masker type on the benefit of spatial cues. Method: Participants were children (5-13 years of age) and adults with normal hearing. Testing occurred in a 180 degrees arc of 11 loudspeakers. Targets were spondees produced by a female talker and presented from a randomly selected loudspeaker; that location was either known, based on a pretrial cue, or unknown. Maskers were two sequences comprising spondees or speech-shaped noise bursts, each presented from a random loudspeaker. Speech maskers were produced by one male talker or by three talkers, two male and one female. Results: Children and adults benefited from the pretrial cue to target location with the three-voice masker, and the magnitude of benefit increased with increasing child age. There was no benefit of location cues in the one-voice or noise-burst maskers. Incorrect responses in the three-voice masker tended to correspond to masker words produced by the female talker, and in the location-known condition, those masker intrusions were more likely near the cued loudspeaker for both age groups. Conclusions: Increasing benefit of the location cue with increasing child age in the three-voice masker suggests maturation of spatially selective attention, but error patterns do not support this idea. Differences in performance in the location-unknown condition could play a role in the differential benefit of the location cue.