Speech reception in kindergarten and primary school classrooms: effects of age and mother-language in a prolonged listening task

A correct hearing and understanding of the verbal message is an essential requirement in the learning process. When listening in presence of background noise or too long reverberation, a complex interplay of perceptual and cognitive processes has to be deployed: the youngest pupils, due to their still immature auditory processing, are especially vulnerable. The aim of the present study is to examine how adverse acoustic conditions modulate differences in speech reception performance during the lesson period, for children aged 5 to 7 having different mother tongue Word Identification by Picture Identification (WIPI) tests in the Italian language were proposed to 154 children. A subset of 33 sequential bilinguals children was identified, who started the acquisition of the Italian language after 3 years of age. The tests were conducted in four real classrooms, with reverberation time in occupied conditions varying between 0.43 and 1.31 s. In each room, the tests were presented at two listening conditions: ambient noise (SNR=15 dB) and speech-shaped stationary noise (SNR=0 dB). During the experiment data on the number of words correctly identified (speech intelligibility, IS) and on the response time (RT) were acquired for each participant. It was assumed that an increase in RT results would reflect greater cognitive processing. The results show that for 5 to 7 years old pupils the presence of noise always causes lower IS and longer RT with respect to a baseline condition. Under similar listening conditions a disadvantage was found for the youngest pupils (5 years) with respect to the oldest (6, 7 years), showing up as both an IS decrease and a RT increase. For the proposed task, the effect of the mother language was apparent for the youngest children alone, and was limited to the accuracy results.