Conference_programme: 18.1 - Effect of room acoustics and noise on speech intelligibility and task performance in schools
Lecture: Experimental investigation of effect of background noise and reverberation on listening comprehension of pre-school children
Author(s): Kawai Keiji, Otaku Momoko
Summary:
While it is widely recognized that child day-care rooms require optimum acoustic condition as children from 0 to 5 years old are supposed to be in the period of developing their listening and language skill, there have been little studied on how their listening comprehension are actually affected by background noise or reverberation. In this study, following our previous study of word intelligibility test for preschool children, an experiment of listening comprehension was conducted in an actual day care room with the participants of 48 three to five year old children as the target group and 6 elementary school pupils and 6 childcare providers as control groups. In the experiment, a participant sat in front of a loudspeaker, by which test sounds were presented, located at 2.5 m distance. Two loudspeakers for noise presentation were located both side of the center speaker at 30 degree angle from the participant. The participant was asked to repeat the syllables of a test sound orally just after the test sound was presented and the voice was recorded with a PCM recorder. The test sounds were Japanese words with four syllables that were selected from the least familiar word group in a word dataset “FW07,” developed by NTT and Tohoku University, in order not to be understood as a known word for all the participants. Room reverberation was set as the original condition (RT = 0.8 s) and an absorbed condition with additional sound absorbers installed (RT = 0.4 s). Background noise was voice bubble created from a recording of a daycare room and presented by two loudspeakers without coherence. As a result, the correct answer ratio of preschool children was lower than pupils and childcare providers and those were strongly affected by S/N ratio.
Corresponding author
Name: Dr Keiji Kawai
e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Country: Japan
