Word Identification in School-Aged Children: Effects of Pitch Contour, Word Position, and Musicianship

These findings suggest that both types of unnatural pitch contours-mixed-pitch and fixed-pitch-reduced children's speech perception in noise compared with the natural spoken contour, with the fixed-pitch condition producing the poorest performance. The primacy and recency effects in free recall were evident in school-aged children's word identification with five-word sequences, with primacy more susceptible to pitch contour distortions. Musicians' higher speech perception in noise was primarily attributed to their greater auditory STM capacity. However, this advantage did not extend to resilience against pitch contour distortions, unfavorable SNRs, or challenging word positions for recall.