Developmental Effects in Masking Release for Speech-in-Speech Perception Due to a Target/Masker Sex Mismatch.

The study tested normal-hearing infants, children, and adults, so it does not show what happens for patients with hearing loss, auditory processing problems, or language disorders. The tasks were laboratory detection and recognition of recorded words in controlled two-talker backgrounds, not classroom or everyday listening. Samples were small, especially for the infant and adult detection experiments, and between-subjects variability was large. Infants were assigned to only one condition, so the sex-mismatch comparison for infants depends on different groups rather than the same infants tested in both conditions. Some infant data were excluded because of high response rates on no-signal trials or insufficient test data. The two-male-talker and two-female-talker maskers were not equivalent sources of masking, so adult comparisons across maskers must be interpreted carefully. The study measured speech perception, not communication skills, language development, or functional listening success.

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Do not conclude that infants can use a male-female voice difference to understand speech in noise. The infant groups did not detect the target word more easily when the target and background talkers were different sexes, and the study tested only laboratory speech detection in children with normal hearing.