Closed-Set Speech Discrimination Tests for Assessing Young Children.

Objective: The main objective of this study is to obtain data assessing normative scores, test-retest reliability, critical differences, and the effect of age for two closed-set consonant-discrimination tests.

Design: The two tests are intended for use with children aged 2 to 8 years. The tests were evaluated using normal-hearing children within the appropriate age range.

Listening to speech in a background of other talkers: effects of talker number and noise vocoding.

Some of the most common interfering background sounds a listener experiences are the sounds of other talkers. In Experiment 1, recognition for natural Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) sentences was measured in normal-hearing adults at two fixed signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) in 16 backgrounds with the same long-term spectrum: unprocessed speech babble (1, 2, 4, 8, and 16 talkers), noise-vocoded versions of the babbles (12 channels), noise modulated with the wide-band envelope of the speech babbles, and unmodulated noise. All talkers were adult males.