Need of good classroom acoustics since the early childhood

Abstract

In everyday lives, the listening experiences often occur in adverse listening environments in which children need to tune out competing sounds to tune into speech. In the early childhood and in the first years of education, a good acoustic environment is mandatory in order to avoid difficulties in literacy development. This is true both for normal children and for children with potential learning disabilities, which can be only diagnosed after this age-period. Whenever children with poor neural processing in speech discrimination are exposed to bad acoustics, they may fall behind their peers in reading development. On the contrary, since the neuroplasticity of the auditory cortex of the human brain is up to about the age of eight years, when at-risk children are trained with learning programs based on sound and visual cues recognition in proper listening environments, the effectiveness of these programs is improved. This work focuses on the evidence of the need of good classroom acoustics by the early stage of education. Preliminary results on a study on the influence of classroom acoustics on the reading skills in the early childhood are reported. The study involved 120 second-grade pupils in three primary schools with different classroom acoustics.