Masked Sentence Recognition in Children, Young Adults, and Older Adults: Age-Dependent Effects of Semantic Context and Masker Type.
Emily Buss, Sarah E Hodge, Lauren Calandruccio and 2 others
PMID 30601213WHAT IT FOUND
Listening to sentences in two competing voices was hardest for young children and older adults, easier for young adults.
Meaningful context helped children more in noise than in speech, and helped adults in both.
Key findings
01Children’s sentence recognition improved with age, and this age effect was larger in two-talker speech than in speech-shaped noise.
02For children, meaningful context helped more in noise than in two-talker speech: the benefit was 2.1 dB in noise and 1.0 dB in two-talker speech.
03Older adults needed louder targets than young adults, especially in two-talker speech, but both adult groups benefited from meaningful context to a similar degree.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study tested normal-hearing or near-normal-hearing listeners, so it does not directly show what happens in children or adults with hearing loss, auditory processing problems, or communication disorders. Older adults were a small group of 13, and their high-frequency hearing thresholds varied widely, so results for this group are less stable and may be partly affected by hearing loss. The design compared different people at different ages, not the same people followed over time, so it describes age differences rather than within-person change. The benefit of meaningful context was small compared with variability from age, masker type, and measurement noise. Some young adults were tested with filtered sounds to simulate high-frequency hearing loss, but that was a separate subset and not the main older adult comparison. The age-equivalence comparisons for older adults were preliminary because no confidence intervals were estimated.
Declared interests
No author conflict-of-interest statement is provided in the supplied text. The article is tagged as supported by NIH extramural research funding.
The easy way to misread this
Do not treat meaningful context as a proven clinical strategy for improving listening in noise. The study tested normal-hearing listeners in a lab, and children’s context benefit was 2.1 dB in noise but only 1.0 dB in two-talker speech.