The Effect of Signal-Temporal Uncertainty during Childhood

The Effect of Signal-Temporal Uncertainty during Childhood Public Deposited

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Bonino, Angela Yarnell
- Affiliation: School of Medicine, Department of Allied Health Sciences, Division of Speech and Hearing Sciences

Abstract

Children are more susceptible to interference from competing background sounds than adults. In the laboratory, children's increased susceptibility to interference from competing sounds is evident for both tone detection and speech recognition tasks. For both types of stimuli, this age effect is pronounced when the background sounds are complex and/or unpredictable. In light of children's increased susceptibility to interference from competing sounds, this dissertation tested the hypothesis that performance would improve if children were provided a cue indicating when in time to listen for target signals. This hypothesis was tested for both tone detection and word recognition in the presence of competing tones or speech, respectively. Parallel studies tested the hypothesis that similar factors affect performance for the two different types of stimuli. For both the tonal and the speech experiments, performance was measured for five to 13 year old children and a group of adult controls (2

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