Listening efficiency during lessons under various types of noise

Pupils inside primary school classrooms can be exposed to extraneous noise, impairing their performance in the speech reception process. The different noises show a peculiar impact, depending on their level, spectral content and temporal fine structure. In order to understand how the disturbance is built up over time, in this work a large data set was analyzed, detailing the changes of the pupils’ performance as the lesson progresses from the start to the end. Several types of noise are considered (traffic, tapping and babble noise) and the analysis concerns III to V graders of the Italian primary school (8 to 10 year old pupils). By using as indicators the intelligibility scores, the response time and their ratio, the so-called “listening efficiency,” several findings are achieved. Pupils respond differently to each noise during the course of the lesson. In the best listening conditions, the performance in the speech reception worsens under traffic and babble noise whereas an opposite trend is found under tapping noise. On the contrary adaptation is observed in the worst listening conditions for the traffic noise alone. Moreover, indications are achieved that the age proficiency may affect differently babble noise compared to traffic and tapping noise.