Institute for Hearing Technology and Acoustics, RWTH Aachen University, Kopernikusstrasse 5, 52074 Aachen, Germany.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2021 Nov;150(5):3263. doi: 10.1121/10.0006752.
Understanding speech in noisy environments, such as classrooms, is a challenge for children. When a spatial separation is introduced between the target and masker, as compared to when both are co-located, children demonstrate intelligibility improvement of the target speech. Such intelligibility improvement is known as spatial release from masking (SRM). In most reverberant environments, binaural cues associated with the spatial separation are distorted; the extent to which such distortion will affect children's SRM is unknown. Two virtual acoustic environments with reverberation times between 0.4 s and 1.1 s were compared. SRM was measured using a spatial separation with symmetrically displaced maskers to maximize access to binaural cues. The role of informational masking in modulating SRM was investigated through voice similarity between the target and masker. Results showed that, contradictory to previous developmental findings on free-field SRM, children's SRM in reverberation has not yet reached maturity in the 7-12 years age range. When reducing reverberation, an SRM improvement was seen in adults but not in children. Our findings suggest that, even though school-age children have access to binaural cues that are distorted in reverberation, they demonstrate immature use of such cues for speech-in-noise perception, even in mild reverberation.
在嘈杂的环境(如教室)中理解言语对儿童来说是一项挑战。当目标和掩蔽声之间存在空间分离时,与两者位于同一位置时相比,儿童对目标言语的可理解度会提高。这种可理解度的提高被称为空间掩蔽释放(SRM)。在大多数混响环境中,与空间分离相关的双耳线索会发生失真;这种失真程度会如何影响儿童的 SRM 尚不清楚。本研究比较了两个混响时间在 0.4 秒到 1.1 秒之间的虚拟声学环境。使用具有对称位移掩蔽器的空间分离来最大限度地利用双耳线索来测量 SRM。通过目标和掩蔽器之间的语音相似度来研究信息掩蔽在调节 SRM 中的作用。结果表明,与自由场 SRM 的先前发展研究结果相反,7-12 岁儿童在混响中的 SRM 尚未成熟。当减少混响时,成年人的 SRM 有所提高,但儿童的 SRM 没有提高。我们的研究结果表明,尽管学龄儿童可以获得在混响中失真的双耳线索,但他们对这些线索在噪声中言语感知的使用还不成熟,即使在轻度混响中也是如此。