Effects of excessive noise and reverberation on listening and learning in a simulated classroom.

Abstract

Elementary students often learn in dynamic discussions during typical classroom lessons. Many classrooms, though, have poor signal‐to‐noise ratios and long reverberation times. The presence of excessive noise and reverberation may increase a student’s listening effort and result in reduced performance during classroom learning. A simulated classroom environment was created which allowed for varying degrees of room reverberation and background noise. In this experiment, groups of elementary‐aged students were seated in the center of the simulated classroom environment and were presented a story read by either five talkers positioned around the student or a single talker in front of the student (reproduced by LCD monitors and loudspeakers). A post‐test was used to assess listener comprehension. Comprehension scores are compared to a group of adult subjects as well as a sentence‐recognition task 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 little or no differences in measures of sentence‐recognition. Finally, comprehension scores are correlated to measures of the speech transmission index in each of the simulated classroom environments.