Speech-in-speech recognition in preschoolers.
Christina Dubas, Heather Porter, Ryan W McCreery and 2 others
PMID 35184649WHAT IT FOUND
Preschoolers needed a much louder voice to understand words in background chatter than adults did.
Children with larger vocabularies understood harder words better, but vocabulary size did not help with very easy words. The test used here worked for most children aged three to four.
Key findings
01Preschoolers required a significantly higher signal-to-noise ratio than adults to recognize words, indicating poorer speech-in-speech perception.
02Receptive vocabulary size predicted speech-in-speech recognition performance for later-acquired words (ChEgSS set) but not for early-acquired words (simple set).
03The forced-choice picture-pointing task was feasible for most preschoolers, with only two of the twenty-three recruited children failing to complete the testing.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The sample size was small (21 preschoolers, 10 adults). The preschoolers had above-average receptive vocabularies (mean normalized score 115), so results may not generalize to children with smaller vocabularies or language delays. The study used a two-talker speech masker, which may not fully represent the diverse noise conditions in classrooms or homes. The difference in performance between word sets could not be fully explained by age of acquisition or lexical frequency, suggesting unmeasured factors like phonetic similarity of foils played a role.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that a child's poor performance on a word recognition test in noise is solely due to a hearing sensitivity issue or lack of attention. The study shows that receptive vocabulary size significantly impacts performance on later-acquired words, meaning a child may hear the sounds but fail to identify the word due to language knowledge gaps.