## 1 Introduction  
Recognizing speech in noisy environments is essential for successful communication in professional, educational, and social activities because it often occurs with background noise. One of the strategies that assist in listening in noisy environments is the ability to identify and follow the voice characteristics of a specific talker of interest [1, 2]. The two fundamental voice characteristics that were found to be significant for voice identification are the speaker's fundamental frequency (F0) and formant frequencies [3, 4, 5]. F0 is the glottal pulse rate, which is influenced primarily by the length and mass of the vocal cords [6]. Formant frequencies reflect the resonance frequencies of the vocal tract and, as such, they provide cues regarding the speaker's vocal tract length (VTL) in association with his or her physical and perceived body size [6]. In quiet listening conditions, adults and children with normal hearing (NH) were shown to rely on formant frequency cues for voice discrimination (VD) [7, 8, 9] and for talker gender categorization [10, 11, 12, 13] and considerably less on F0 cues [7, 8, 9]. Listening in noisy environments, however, introduces different challenges for discriminating between speakers because noise tends to mask spectral information, such as formants [14, 15] and temporal information, including pitch [16, 17]. To date, no study has been conducted to explore the utilization of voice cues for discriminating between speakers when in noisy environments. Thus, it remains unclear whether the outcomesobserved in noisy conditions will be similar to those observed in quiet conditions, with the formats being the most prominent cues. Moreover, children are known to be more vulnerable to the effects of noise [18; 19; 20] and differ from adults in their utilization of voice cues during speaker-discrimination tasks conducted in quiet conditions [9; 21]. Therefore, the influence of noise on their reliance on both cues for VD is unknown. The purpose of the present study was to examine the effect of background noise on the utilization of F0 and formant cues for VD in young adults and school-age children with NH. The perception of formants has been shown to rely on the frequency resolution capabilities of the cochlea (e.g., [22; 23]). Formants are considered robust cues for vowels, mainly because they provide stable acoustic information for more than 100 msec [6] and are therefore readily available to listeners. They can be accompanied by visible articulatory cues that assist in the early acquisition of vowels for hearing and hearing-impaired children [24]. In contrast, the perception of F0 is known to depend on both spectral resolution and temporal processing of the changes in intensity over time in the speech envelope [25; 26]. F0 cues are typically not accompanied by visible articulatory information and are considered subtle and therefore less available to listeners, especially in difficult listening conditions. In quiet conditions, children and adults were observed to yield greater advantages from formants compared to F0 cues for VD, supporting the notion that formant frequencies are reliable cues for recognizing a specific speaker [7; 8]. The few studies that investigated the effect of background noise on the perception of these cues showed that noise distorted the spectral information conveyed in the speech signal [14; 15] and thus negatively affected discrimination between formants [27; 28]. Furthermore, the presence of background noise has been documented to impede tasks involving pitch perception, including identifying lexical tones [16] and recognizing emotional tones in speech [17], thereby indicating its potentially detrimental effect on F0 perception as well. These findings give rise to the hypothesis that both acoustic cues may be susceptible to noise and therefore may be differently utilized in noisy conditions compared to quiet conditions.