Background Speech Disrupts Working Memory Span in 5-Year-Old Children.

Objectives: The present study tested the effects of background speech and nonspeech noise on 5-year-old children's working memory span.

Design: Five-year-old typically developing children (range = 58.6 to 67.

Word segmentation from noise-band vocoded speech.

Spectral degradation reduces access to the acoustics of spoken language and compromises how learners break into its structure. We hypothesised that spectral degradation disrupts word segmentation, but that listeners can exploit other cues to restore detection of words. Normal-hearing adults were familiarised to artificial speech that was unprocessed or spectrally degraded by noise-band vocoding into 16 or 8 spectral channels.