Room acoustics and speech perception: Considerations for the developing child

What children hear in noisy rooms is not the same thing that adults hear. Despite precocious maturation of the peripheral auditory system, the ability to hear and understand speech in the presence of competing backgrounds sounds is not fully developed until adolescence. This talk will review results of behavioral studies of auditory masking in children, with a focus on the development speech perception in complex acoustical environments. Data will be presented that support the hypothesis that children’s increased susceptibility to auditory masking relative to adults is related to immature perceptual processing such as sound source segregation and selective attention. Findings from studies investigating the extent to which children benefit from acoustic cues thought to facilitate sound source segregation will be highlighted.