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Related Experiment Video

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Author Spotlight: Investigating the Impact of Emotional Prosodies on Voice Recognition and Perception

Author Spotlight: Investigating the Impact of Emotional Prosodies on Voice Recognition and Perception

Published on: August 9, 2024

Individual differences in language and working memory affect children's speech recognition in noise.

Ryan W McCreery¹, Meredith Spratford¹, Benjamin Kirby²

¹a Audibility, Perception and Cognition Laboratory , Boys Town National Research Hospital , Omaha , NE , USA and.

International Journal of Audiology

|December 17, 2016

Summary

Children’s working memory and language skills significantly impact their ability to understand speech in noisy environments. Better cognitive and linguistic abilities correlate with improved speech recognition, especially for complex language stimuli.

Keywords:

Behavioural measures noise paediatric psychoacoustics/hearing science speech perception

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Infant Auditory Processing and Event-related Brain Oscillations

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Published on: July 1, 2015

Area of Science:

Child development
Auditory processing
Cognitive neuroscience

Background:

Speech recognition in noise is crucial for language acquisition.
Cognitive and linguistic skills are hypothesized to influence auditory perception.
Understanding these relationships can inform educational and clinical interventions.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the relationship between cognitive (working memory) and linguistic (vocabulary, syntax) skills and speech recognition in noise in children.
To determine if these cognitive and linguistic factors predict individual differences in auditory performance.

Main Methods:

A prospective, cross-sectional study involving 96 children with normal hearing (ages 5-12).
Children completed speech recognition tasks with three types of auditory stimuli: words, sentences, and word sequences.
Measures of working memory, vocabulary, and syntax were administered.

Main Results:

Higher working memory capacity was significantly associated with better speech recognition across all stimulus types.
Stronger vocabulary skills correlated with improved recognition of sentences and word sequences, but not isolated words.
These findings highlight the interplay between cognitive, linguistic, and auditory skills.

Conclusions:

Both working memory and language abilities are important factors in children's speech recognition in noise.
The influence of these skills varies depending on the complexity and nature of the auditory stimuli.
Clinical assessments of speech recognition in children should consider underlying cognitive and linguistic proficiencies, aligning with the Ease of Language Understanding model.