AAAF News

Make A Gift

 2008 Student Investigator Award

Angela Yarnell Bonino, MS
Doctoral Student, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Title: Children’s Speech Perception in Noise: Ability to Use a Carrier Phrase to Separate the Target from the Background
Mentor: Lori Leibold, PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Abstract: Children perform more poorly on speech perception measures in noise than adults. One potential explanation for children’s increased susceptibility to noise is that they have difficulty perceptually segregating the target speech from the competing background noise. Providing cures for the perceptual segregation of a signal from the background can improve children’s thresholds for detecting a tone of informational masking paradigms which use a competing background of multiple frequency components. A carrier phrase may provide a similar type of cue during a speech perception task by allowing the listener to form a coherent auditory stream with the additional temporal and spectral information. We have recently shown that using a carrier phrase improves children’s performance for Phonetically-Balance Kindergarten (PBK) words in multi-talker babble (Bonino & Leibold, 2007). The purpose of the proposed research is to determine if the benefit of using the carrier phrase in a competing background is because it assists children in perceptual segregation by forming a coherent auditory stream for the signal.

Acknowledgement: I would like to thank Dr. Lori Leibold, my mentor, for her invaluable assistance and guidance during the development of this research project. Also, I appreciate the helpful comments provided by Dr. Emily Buss and pilot data collection assistance by Laura Flennor and Caitlin Rawn.

Back