Conference_programme: 18.1 - Effect of room acoustics and noise on speech intelligibility and task performance in schools

Lecture: Open-plan study environments: Effects of background speech and reverberation time on a collaboration task.

Author(s): Braat-Eggen Ella, Keus Van De Poll Marijke, Hornikx Maarten, Kohlrausch Armin

Summary:
Due to new ways of learning, open-plan study environments (OPSEs) become more important in higher education. As shown in a recent field study, nearly 40 percent of students working in OPSEs is disturbed by background noise. The most common tasks in OPSEs are writing, reading and student-cooperation. From research it is well known that semantic-based tasks such as writing and reading are easily disturbed by semantic aspects in irrelevant background speech. Less is known, however, about the effects of background speech on cooperation tasks which also are semantical tasks as they demand verbal communication. Therefore, the aim of this study is to analyze the influence of the background speech on student-cooperation.\nTo manipulate speech intelligibility in a background soundscape, computational modelling and auralization were used to simulate background speech in an OPSE. The composed soundscapes contained different speech intelligibility levels by using two different reverberation times and two different languages. As a result, four different sound conditions were composed and one silent control condition. Students worked in pairs to solve spot-the-difference puzzles, by using the Diapix dialogue elicitation technique, while being exposed to the five background sound conditions. The effectiveness of collaboration was measured by the amount of found differences in each puzzle. Also, the subjective disturbance was measured by a questionnaire.\nFirst results show a longer reverberation time to be rated significantly more disruptive than a shorter reverberation time. The influence of the language of the background speech on disturbance and performance is less statistically significant. These and other results will be discussed in the context of theoretical frameworks such as interference-by-process.\n

Corresponding author

Name: Ms Ella Braat-Eggen

e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Country: Netherlands