The present paper provides an overview of research concerning both acute and chronic effects of exposure to noise on children's cognitive performance. Experimental studies addressing the impact of acute exposure showed negative effects on speech perception and listening comprehension. These effects are more pronounced in children as compared to adults. Children with language or attention disorders and second-language learners are still more impaired than age-matched controls. Noise-induced disruption was also found for non-auditory tasks, i.e., serial recall of visually presented lists and reading. The impact of chronic exposure to noise was examined in quasi-experimental studies. Indoor noise and reverberation in classroom settings were found to be associated with poorer performance of the children in verbal tasks. Regarding chronic exposure to aircraft noise, studies consistently found that high exposure is associated with lower reading performance. Even though the reported effects are usually small in magnitude, and confounding variables were not always sufficiently controlled, policy makers responsible for noise abatement should be aware of the potential impact of environmental noise on children's development.

The effects of classroom noise and background speech on speech perception, measured by word-to-picture matching, and listening comprehension, measured by execution of oral instructions, were assessed in first- and third-grade children and adults in a classroom-like setting. For speech perception, in addition to noise, reverberation time (RT) was varied by conducting the experiment in two virtual classrooms with mean RT = 0.47 versus RT = 1.1 s. Children were more impaired than adults by background sounds in both speech perception and listening comprehension. Classroom noise evoked a reliable disruption in children's speech perception even under conditions of short reverberation. RT had no effect on speech perception in silence, but evoked a severe increase in the impairments due to background sounds in all age groups. For listening comprehension, impairments due to background sounds were found in the children, stronger for first- than for third-graders, whereas adults were unaffected. Compared to classroom noise, background speech had a smaller effect on speech perception, but a stronger effect on listening comprehension, remaining significant when speech perception was controlled. This indicates that background speech affects higher-order cognitive processes involved in children's comprehension. Children's ratings of the sound-induced disturbance were low overall and uncorrelated to the actual disruption, indicating that the children did not consciously realize the detrimental effects. The present results confirm earlier findings on the substantial impact of noise and reverberation on children's speech perception, and extend these to classroom-like environmental settings and listening demands closely resembling those faced by children at school.

Four reaction time experiments examined the mental rotation process using a psychological refractory period paradigm. On each trial, participants made speeded responses to both a tone (Sj) and a rotated letter (S 2), presented with varying stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). If mental rotation of the stimulus letter can proceed while central mechanisms are busy with S lt then the effect of orientation should decrease substantially with decreasing SO A. Contrary to these predictions, the effect of orientation was nearly constant across SOAs, suggesting that mental rotation cannot effectively proceed without help from central mechanisms. These results support the conclusion that mental rotation requires access to a single-channel mechanism and must therefore be performed serially with other operations requiring the same mechanism.

With two experiments, effects of irrelevant speech and classroom noise on serial recall of common nouns presented pictorially were investigated in children and adults. Experiment 1 used fixed list lengths for children (first graders) and adults. Experiment 2 used list lengths adjusted to participants' (secondÁthird graders, adults) individual spans. In both experiments, children and adults were equally impaired by irrelevant speech. This contrasts with a related study (differences in methodology) by Elliott (2002), who reported severe increase in the detrimental impact of irrelevant speech with decreasing age. In both experiments, classroom noise had no effect in overall analyses. For Experiment 1, however, separate group analyses revealed impairment in children. Results suggest that effects of irrelevant sounds on serial recall stem from two separate mechanisms: Specific interference due to the sounds' automatic access to short-term memory, and/or attention capture. Only for the latter there is developmental change.

No abstract