Performance of children aged 9 to 17 years on a test of speech intelligibility in noise using sentence material with controlled word predictability

Performance of children aged 9 to 17 years on the SPIN test (Speech Perception in Noise) is described. The 11- and 13-year-olds performed significantly poorer than 15- and 17-year-olds, and this difference occurred primarily for high-predictability sentences presented at a O-dB signal-to-babble ratio. Performance of nine-year-olds was significantly poorer than performance of 11-year-olds. Possible reasons for these differences are discussed.