Development of the binaural intelligibility level difference for speech-in-speech recognition

This study aimed to characterize maturation of the binaural intelligibility level difference (BILD) for school-age children in the context of speech-in-speech recognition. Children (5-17 years) and adults completed an adaptive, open-set sentence recognition task in a two-talker masker in two binaural conditions: (1) target and masker speech in-phase across the two ears, and (2) target speech presented 180° out-of-phase across the two ears and masker speech presented in-phase. Estimates of the BILD, computed as the difference score between the two binaural conditions, were mature by ten years of age, consistent with previous data on the BILD for speech-in-noise recognition.