Updated: February 24, 2006

Investigator:

Arlene Neuman, Ph.D.
Judith Gravel, Ph.D.

Purpose of this study:

To empirically determine the effects of reverberation, noise, and distance from the talker on children's speech recognition abilities for various classrooms; to validate the Boothroyd model for predicting the effects of classroom acoustics on the speech recognition abilities of pre-school and school-aged children; and, to measure the benefits and limitations of SF FM technology for children 3 to 12 years of age in classrooms that are examples of intrinsically 'good', 'fair' and 'poor' acoustic environments.

Project description:

Barriers are imposed by the acoustic climate of classrooms that limit children's access to the full range of acoustic speech cues. Factors include reverberation, background noise, and distance from the teacher (Boothroyd, 2002a). Well-fit hearing aids and cochlear implants can optimize speech understanding for children with hearing loss, but only in quiet environments. When listening in poor acoustic environments such as exist in most classrooms (Picard & Bradley, 2001; Knecht et al., 2002), speech recognition abilities plummet and access to intelligible spoken language is greatly compromised (Boothroyd & Iglehart, 1998). Most of what is known about speech recognition performance for degraded speech has been obtained on adults. In this project, information about speech recognition performance for speech recorded in real classrooms should be useful in determining how performance of children can be predicted from knowledge of the characteristics of the classrooms.

Project Progress:

A pilot study on 10 adults in the poorest classroom listening environment has been completed and data analyzed. Collection of data on children 5-8 years of age is in progress.

For more information, contact Arlene Neuman, Ph.D.