Toddlers' ability to map the meaning of new words in multi-talker environments

Whether in a noisy daycare center, home, or classroom, many of the environments children are exposed to are, undoubtedly, not acoustically ideal for speech processing. Yet, somehow, these toddlers are still able to acquire vocabularies consisting of hundreds of words. The current study explores the effect of background speech noise on children's early word learning (specifically, their ability to map a label onto an object). Three groups of children aged 32-36 months were taught two new words either in quiet, or in the presence of multi-talker babble at a +5 or 0 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). They were then tested on their learning of these new word-to-object mappings. Children showed similar accuracy in all three conditions, suggesting that even at a 0 dB SNR, children were successfully able to learn new words.