Evaluation of Word Recognition Abilities in Children in 4-talker Babble Noise / 听力学及言语疾病杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective The aim of this study is to evaluate word recognition abilities in 4-talker babble noise (BN) in children with normal hearing (NH), and to explore the lexical effects, age on speech recognition ability in children.Methods Children of 3~6 years old with normal hearing (N=212)were participated in this study.One hundred and twenty-four children were performed under the quiet conditions,while 88 were performed in 4-talker babble noise.The standard-Chinese version of the lexical neighborhood test was used to assess spoken word recognition performance.The speech level was 70 dB SPL, and signal to noise ratio (SNR) was chosen 4 dB in BN.Results The correct scores of the NH children in quiet for the DE, DH, ME, and MH words were 96.45%±5.17%, 88.87%±7.73%, 91.90%±7.31% and 82.38%±7.95%, while the scores in BN were 85.34%±11.23%, 66.42%±11.08%, 68.81%±15.99% and 48.58%±12.81%, respectively.The word-recognition performance in BN was significantly poorer than that in quiet.The word recognition scores showed that the lexical effects were significant in the BN (P<0.05).Children scored higher with dissyllabic words than with monosyllabic words;easy words scored higher than hard words in both quiet and noisy environments.The word-recognition performance also increased with age in each lexical category in the 3-to 6-year-old NH children.Conclusion Age and lexical characteristics of words had significant influences on the performance of Mandarin-Chinese word recognition in BN.The lexical effects were more noticeable under noise listening conditions than in quiet.The word-recognition performance in noise increased with age in NH children of 3-to 6-years old in noise and had not reached adult-like performance at 6 years of age.