Discrimination of Static and Dynamic Spectral Patterns by Children and Young Adults in Relationship to Speech Perception in Noise

Past work has shown relationship between the ability to discriminate spectral patterns and measures of speech intelligibility. The purpose of this study was to investigate the ability of both children and young adults to discriminate static and dynamic spectral patterns, comparing performance between the two groups and evaluating within-group results in terms of relationship to speech-in-noise perception. Data were collected from normal-hearing children (age range: 5.4-12.8 years) and young adults (mean age: 22.8 years) on two spectral discrimination tasks and speech-in-noise perception. The first discrimination task, involving static spectral profiles, measured the ability to detect a change in the phase of a low-density sinusoidal spectral ripple of wideband noise. Using dynamic spectral patterns, the second task determined the signal-to-noise ratio needed to discriminate the temporal pattern of frequency fluctuation imposed by stochastic low-rate frequency modulation (FM). Children performed significantly poorer than young adults on both discrimination tasks. For children, a significant correlation between speech-in-noise perception and spectral-pattern discrimination was obtained only with the dynamic patterns of the FM condition, with partial correlation suggesting that factors related to the children’s age mediated the relationship.