Experimental investigation of the effects of the acoustical conditions in a simulated classroom on speech recognition and learning in children

Abstract

The potential effects of acoustical environment on speech understanding are especially important as children enter school where students' ability to hear and understand complex verbal information is critical to learning. However, this ability is compromised because of widely varied and unfavorable classroom acoustics. The extent to which unfavorable classroom acoustics affect children's performance on longer learning tasks is largely unknown as most research has focused on testing children using words, syllables, or sentences as stimuli. In the current study, a simulated classroom environment was used to measure comprehension performance of two classroom learning activities: a discussion and lecture. Comprehension performance was measured for groups of elementary-aged students in one of four environments with varied reverberation times and background noise levels. The reverberation time was either 0.6 or 1.5 s, and the signal-to-noise level was either þ10 or þ7 dB. Performance is compared to adult subjects as well as to sentence-recognition in the same condition. Significant differences were seen in comprehension scores as a function of age and condition; both increasing background noise and reverberation degraded performance in comprehension tasks compared to minimal differences in measures of sentence-recognition.

Effect of Minimal/Mild Hearing Loss on Children’s Speech Understanding in a Simulated Classroom

“…The simulated acoustic environment consisted of a physical room and a virtually-modeled room (a detailed description of the creation and validation of the environment is presented in Valente et al 2012). In brief, the physical room was fitted with passive acoustical treatments and loudspeakers and LCD monitors on desks were arranged around a child’s location (Fig.…”

“…To address the above issues, a simulated classroom environment was created to examine the effect of acoustic environment (signal to noise ratio (SNR), reverberation time (RT), visual component, talker location) on speech understanding (Valente et al 2012). Valente et al reported results of two experiments conducted to examine simple (sentence repetition) and complex (comprehension) speech understanding tasks in children and adults in this simulated environment.…”

“…To examine how MMHL affects children’s speech understanding in realistic acoustic environments, the current study compared sentence repetition and story comprehension for a group of children with MMHL and age-matched children with NH using the experimental task from the first experiment described in Valente et al (2012). Children listened to a play read by the teacher and four students (SNR = 10 dB; RT = 0.6 sec).…”

On the perception of speech in primary school classrooms: Ranking of noise interference and of age influence

“…One explanation suggested stems from the noise impairment induced on the unique mechanisms underlying the two tasks. A novel paradigm was recently used for tests in a virtual classroom 10 where features of the real environment were taken into closer consideration. This study employed HVAC noise and focused on sentence recognition and classroom learning over a lesson divided into lecture and discussion.…”

Effects of reverberation and noise on speech comprehension by native and non-native English-speaking listeners

“…They conclude that listening comprehension using a paper-pencil instructional task was more impaired than speech recognition using a word-to-picture matching task. This is further supported by Valente et al (2012), who also tested four combinations comprised of two SNRs (+7 vs. +10 dB) crossed with two RTs (0.6 vs. 1.5 seconds). Although no direct comparison was made for speech comprehension versus recognition, results showed that the detrimental effect of reverberation and noise was more pronounced in speech comprehension tasks than speech recognition tasks.…”