Word discrimination in the presence of competing speech with children.

This study was conducted to examine the auditory masking effects of classes of linguistic strings varying in syntactic and semantic constraints upon word discrimination abilities of children. Twelve fourth grade (age 9), normal hearing, native speakers of English served as subjects. Three half-lists of the Central Institute for the Deaf W-22 word lists were presented consecutively with one of three competing linguistic messages. Discrimination scores served as measures. A treatment-by-subject analysis of variance and t-tests for independent samples were used in the analysis of the data. No significant differences in word discrimination as a function of linguistic masker were found. Comparisons between the data obtained with the children of the present study and that of adult subjects of a similar investigation (Percept. Mot. Skills 41, 578-593, 1975) indicated no significant difference in mean discrimination scores under the grammatical and semantically anomalous conditions; however, significance was found for the ungrammatical masker. Selective listening and language processing were used in the discussion of the findings