Speech comprehension and intelligibility in noise in 11 to 13 years old children: What is the relationship?

In classrooms, the correct reception of what the teacher says is a necessary condition for learning, but it is not sufficient to ensure that the content of the message is understood. Notwithstanding this, usually a direct positive correlation between the performance in speech reception and sentence comprehension (SC) is assumed. In fact, this idea is the ground for the use of speech intelligibility (SI) in the design of learning spaces. In this study, the relationship between SC and SI is investigated in three listening conditions, with reference to 159 school-age children, aged 11 to 13 years old, with normal hearing. Participants completed two tasks designed and validated to measure SI and SC, which were presented in three conditions: quiet, classroom noise and road traffic noise. The tasks were presented to groups of children within their classrooms, via tablet and loudspeakers, within a one-hour session. For each task, results in quiet were compared to the results in noise, assessing the specific effect of each masker; furthermore, the presence of an interaction between noise type and task type was investigated to gain insight on the relation between the two tasks.