Effects of Auditory Masking on Children's Use of Semantic Context

Abstract

More often than not, children spend their lives in noisy environments where they must learn and listen to language. Although spoken word recognition is a well-documented process in quiet conditions, it remains unclear how background noise influences the mechanisms involved in child speech perception The current study investigated how children’s ability to use informative semantic sentence cues to facilitate lexical access of an upcoming word and suppress similar sounding competitors is impacted by speech-shaped noise and two-talker babble noise. We hypothesized that children would use semantic context in the informative condition to facilitate lexical access of the target and suppress cohort competitors despite the presence of maskers. Additionally, we hypothesized that over time, children would be slower to fixate on the target image and would sustain fixations to the cohort image for longer in the two-talker babble condition. Eye tracking equipment monitored eye gazes across four images during the presentation of a sentence stimulus masked with background noise. In both the two-talker babble and speech-shaped noise maskers, children were able to use semantic context to facilitate access of a target word and suppress cohort competition. Although children demonstrated a trend toward prolonged consideration of the cohort competitor in the two-talker babble condition, there was no significant effect of noise type when considering target fixations, potentially suggesting that at high signal-to-noise ratios, children are able to benefit from semantic context when masked by both two-talker babble and speech-shaped noise. Overall, these findings highlight the importance of researching complex auditory environments where children spend much of their time learning and listening to spoken speech.