Research Articles
How Children Learn to Listen: Boys Town Researchers Study How Kids Develop Awareness of Speech Cues
Reviewed by: Adam Bosen, Ph.D.
Published: September 2026
Reading time: ~3 min
When you listen to someone talk, some speech frequencies contain more information than others.
Frequencies in the middle of the speech spectrum contain important information. Researchers at Boys Town National Research Hospital studied how children use this information and found that awareness of this information changes as kids grow up. The study was published in Ear and Hearing in 2026.
What types of speech cues occur at different frequencies?
Sound is made up of different frequencies, measured in hertz (Hz). Low frequencies contain speech cues like the talker’s voice pitch. High frequencies contain speech cues that help us tell the difference between words like “sip” and “ship”. When people listen to speech, different parts of the sound signal carry different amounts of useful information. Researchers measure how important each frequency is for understanding speech.
In adults, frequency importance is well understood and is used to build models that predict how well someone will understand speech. The question this study asked was whether frequency importance is the same in children, or whether importance changes as children grow up.
What did the Boys Town researchers find?
The team studied 42 children ages 6 to 13 with normal hearing. Each child completed a filtered word recognition task. In this task, some frequencies were randomly removed from words and nonwords to see how much those frequencies were contributing to speech recognition. Children also completed a battery of vocabulary and cognitive tests.
The results showed that frequency importance changes with age. Specifically, frequencies around 2000 and 4000 Hz became more important for older children compared to younger ones. The researchers also found that frequencies around 500, 1000 and 2000 Hz were more important for real words than for nonwords. Performance on a flanker task, which measures response speed and attentional control, was a significant predictor of how accurately children recognized speech. Vocabulary size and other cognitive measures did not predict frequency importance after accounting for age.
What does this mean for models used in clinical practice?
The researchers concluded that models used to predict speech recognition accuracy in children may need to be updated to account for these developmental changes. Without those updates, the study states that speech intelligibility estimates will likely overestimate how well children actually understand speech.
The researchers also noted that future work is needed to determine whether the developmental trajectory of frequency importance weights is affected by hearing loss in children who are hard of hearing. They speculate that reduced audibility of important frequencies may impair how children develop awareness of speech cues.
Want to read the research yourself?
Bosen AK, Frenette A, Spratford M, Lewis D, Walker EA, McCreery RW. "Developmental Changes in Speech Frequency Weighting in Children." Ear and Hearing, 2026.
Published Article
The article of record on the publisher's website. DOI: 10.1121/10.0042364|
PubMed
PubMed is the National Library of Medicine's index of biomedical research, where you can view this publication's citation and abstract.
PubMed Central
PubMed Central is the National Library of Medicine's free full-text archive, where you can read the complete article.