In Brief:
Children’s speech recognition in noise was examined in two studies. Children (5–10 years of age) and adults identified monosyllabic words presented in speech-shaped noise, multitalker babble, or two-talker speech. Compared with the adults, the children were more susceptible to all three maskers. In addition, different patterns of susceptibility to masking were seen during childhood. However, despite increased susceptibility to masking, the children were able to use a carrier phrase (i.e., “say the word ___”) to improve their word recognition. Carrier-phrase benefit was only observed for conditions believed to produce perceptual masking and not for those associated primarily with energetic masking.
