Purpose: Maturation of the ability to recognize target speech in the presence of a two-talker speech masker extends into early adolescence. This study evaluated whether children benefit from differences in fundamental frequency (f[subscript o]) contour depth between the target and masker speech, a cue that has been shown to improve recognition in…

Purpose: Knowing target location can improve adults' speech-in-speech recognition in complex auditory environments, but it is unknown whether young children listen selectively in space. This study evaluated masked word recognition with and without a pretrial cue to location to characterize the influence of listener age and masker type on the…

Purpose: Some speech recognition data suggest that children rely less on voice pitch and harmonicity to support auditory scene analysis than adults. Two experiments evaluated development of speech-in-speech recognition using voiced speech and whispered speech, which lacks the harmonic structure of voiced speech. Method: Listeners were 5- to…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the independent and combined contributions of fundamental frequency (F0) and vocal tract length (VTL) differences on children's speech-in-speech recognition in the presence of a competing two-talker masker. Method: Participants were 64 children (5-17 years old) and 25 adults (18-39 years old).…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to characterize spatial hearing abilities of children with longstanding unilateral hearing loss (UHL). UHL was expected to negatively impact children's sound source localization and masked speech recognition, particularly when the target and masker were separated in space. Spatial release from masking (SRM)…