Effects of binaural classroom noise scenarios on primary school children's speech perception and listening comprehension

Abstract

When it comes to learning in school, perception of speech and listening comprehension are crucial. The ability to listen effectively under the conditions of background noise and reverberation in a classroom involves the ability to continuously filter out background noise and fill in missing pieces in the speech communicated by teachers or classmates. A large number of experimental tasks have demonstrated that children's speech perception is significantly more sensitive to unfavorable listening settings than adults' (Buss et al., 2017; Klatte et al. 2013). Despite this, there are just a few studies that have looked at the impact of real-world classroom noise on children's performance in listening tasks that take into account the demands of school-based education. Rather, the increased listening effort appeared to lower the amount of resources available for storing and processing information in working memory, as demonstrated by Klatte and colleagues (2010). The goal of this study is to compare children's performance on word identification and listening comprehension tasks in realistic classroom scenarios, which include monaural and binaural reproductions of complex background noises such as typical classroom sounds and non-native children's speech. Conclusions on the acoustic design of learning environments and the development of speech-in-noise perception in primary school students can be drawn.