Classroom acoustics: Listening problems in children

Abstract

The acoustic quality of classrooms is crucial for children’s listening skills and consequently for their learning. Listening abilities in kids are still developing, and an environment with inadequate acoustic characteristics may create additional problems in speech perception and phonetic recognition. Background noise or reverberation may cause auditory processing problems and greater cognitive effort. There are also other elements which can make difficulty in listening and understanding in noisy environments an even more serious problem, such as learning disabilities, mild to severe hearing loss or bilingualism. Therefore, it is important to improve the acoustic quality of the classrooms, taking into account the specific needs of children in terms of signal-to-noise ratio and reverberation time, in order to ensure a proper quality of listening. The aim of this work is to analyse, through the review of previous studies, the impact that the acoustic of classrooms has on children’s listening skills and learning activities.

Effects of Noise and a Speaker's Impaired Voice Quality on Spoken Language Processing in School-Aged Children: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

“…Children's learning and academic attainment at school may depend on a range of factors, such as student-teacher interactions (Vandenbroucke, Spilt, Verschueren, Piccinin, & Baeyens, 2018), teachers' classroom management skills (Korpershoek, Harms, de Boer, van Kuijk, & Doolaard, 2016), and teachers' ability to transfer knowledge to their students (Kraft, Blazar, & Hogan, 2018). From an acoustical perspective, effective classroom listening may be hindered by classroom noise and reverberation (Gheller, Lovo, Arsie, & Bovo, 2020;Klatte, Bergström, & Lachmann 2013;Shield & Dockrell, 2003) as well as by a teacher's poor voice quality (Martins, Pereira, Hidalgo, & Tavares, 2014;Rodrigues, Medeiros, & Teixeira, 2017).…”

“…Spoken language processing is also linked to working memory, because speech-information must be temporarily stored, manipulated, and recalled (Rönnberg et al, 2013). Narrative reviews indicate that children experience a higher listening effort (as can be indirectly assessed by means of RT measures; see e.g., Schiller et al, 2020), and make more processing errors when listening to speech that is degraded by noise (Gheller et al, 2020;Klatte et al, 2013;Shield & Dockrell, 2003) or a speaker's impaired voice (Rodrigues et al, 2017). However, these effects have never been synthesized and quantified in a systematic review and meta-analysis.…”

“…However, as REVIEWING THE EFFECTS OF POOR LISTENING CONDITIONS highlighted above, spoken language processing entails more than just auditory-perceptual mapping. In fact, it can be disturbed even under circumstances of high intelligibility (Gheller et al, 2020;Klatte, Lachmann, & Meis, 2010). Researchers have become aware that evaluating the consequences of acoustic adversity within naturalistic listening contexts calls for a greater variety of listening tasks.…”

How classroom acoustics influence students and teachers: A systematic literature review

“…Classroom acoustics have special effects on children with special needs such as language impairment (Sala, Hakala, Rantala, Holmqvist, Jonsdottir & Rantanen et al, 2014), ADHD (Allen & Pammer, 2018), autism (Kanakri et al, 2017) and hearing disorders (Iglehart, 2020). Also learning disabilities, mild to severe hearing loss or bilingualism are to be taken into account to consider classroom acoustics (Gheller, Lovo, Arsie & Bovo, 2020). All the research in this sense is conclusive: these children are more affected by poor classroom acoustics and noise.…”

Condiciones acústicas en las aulas de clase: Una revisión de la literatura

“…Considerando que el mensaje oral se ha convertido en el medio más utilizado para la educación en el mundo, un punto interesante a discutir al considerar los parámetros acústicos es su impacto en la salud y los procesos educativos. Se afirma que la reverberación o el ruido de fondo pueden tener impactos negativos para el procesamiento auditivo y conllevar a que se realicen esfuerzos cognitivos elevados [25].…”