Extended High Frequency Effects on Children’s Open-Set Sentence Recognition in a Two-talker Masker

The goal of this study was to examine the extent to which children (5-17 yrs) can take advantage of extended high frequency energy (EHF) when recognizing speech in a two-talker speech masker. Recent work demonstrated that EHF can be beneficial for adults’ speech-in-speech recognition, but the role of EHF in children’s speech recognition is not well understood. Given children’s superior EHF hearing relative to adults, we hypothesized that EHF could be particularly useful to children in multitalker environments. The current study used an adaptive procedure to measure children’s open-set sentence recognition in a two-talker masker. There were two filtering conditions: (1) full band stimuli, and (2) stimuli low-pass filtered at 8 kHz. In addition, because EHF energy in speech is dependent on talker head orientation, two masker head rotation conditions were tested: both maskers at 45 degrees or 60 degrees rotation, relative to the target talker. Results demonstrate children perform best when EHF was present, suggesting children can use EHF for speech-in-speech recognition. However, regardless of condition, overall performance was poorer for children compared to adults. This suggests that while EHF is a useful cue for children, increased EHF hearing sensitivity (relative to adults) did not increase their EHF benefit.