Effects of Masker Intelligibility and Talker Sex on Speech-in-Speech Recognition by Mandarin Speakers Across the Lifespan.
Duo-Duo Tao, Yuhui Fan, John J Galvin and 2 others
PMID 40097377WHAT IT FOUND
Mandarin-speaking children struggle to use voice pitch to separate speakers but gain huge benefit from unintelligible maskers.
Older adults do the opposite: they use pitch cues well but gain little from unintelligibility. Speech-in-speech difficulty shifts from sensory to cognitive processing across the lifespan.
Key findings
01Children showed the poorest performance in understanding speech when the competing talkers had the same sex as the target, indicating they cannot yet use voice pitch cues to segregate speakers.
02Older adults gained significantly less benefit from unintelligible (reversed) maskers than younger groups, suggesting age-related decline in temporal processing reduces the advantage of removing linguistic content.
03Across all ages, removing the intelligibility of the competing speech (using reversed audio) provided twice as much help in hearing the target as changing the competing talker's sex did.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study used closed-set matrix sentences with only two keywords to identify, which may not reflect the complexity of open-set conversation. Cognitive abilities were not measured, so it is unclear how much of the age-related performance decline is due to auditory processing versus cognitive load. The participants had age-adjusted normal hearing, so results may not apply to those with significant sensorineural hearing loss. The study was conducted in Mandarin, a tonal language, so findings about pitch cue utilization may not generalize directly to non-tonal language speakers.
Declared interests
None reported.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that older adults struggle with speech-in-speech primarily because they cannot hear high frequencies or that children struggle because they cannot hear the target. The study found no correlation between pure-tone hearing loss and performance, and the deficits were specific to the type of cue (intelligibility vs. sex), not general audibility.