Effects of classroom noise on the speech perception of bilingual children learning in their second language: Preliminary results

Abstract

Objective: The objective was to determine the effects of noise on speech perception skills in immigrant children and to compare the results with those relative to monolingual matched peers. Study design: This was a case-control study, 11 immigrant children (aged 6–10 years) learning through their second language (L2) and 10 Italian-only-speaking matched peers. The speech-to-noise ratio (SNR) to obtain a 50% intelligibility (SRT) for Italian words had been measured by using an adaptive method. Results: For L2 learning children the SNR were +0.4dB (SD 2.1) with energetic ipsilateral masking (cocktail party) and -16.1dB (SD 2.5) with informational contralateral masking (continued discourse). For the control group the SNR were -0.5dB (SD 2.0) with energetic ipsilateral masking and -17.2dB (SD 3.2) with informational con-tralateral masking. With the energetical masking, SNR decreased as exposure to L2 increased; in contrast, the informational masking produced an opposing trend. Conclusion: Under adverse conditions, non-native speech communication in children seems to be less effective. We look forward with optimism in the hope that these data will be directly applied to more engineering-oriented disciplines associated with speech communication (i.e. speech intelligibility in room acoustics, design of communication systems).

Key words::

• cross-language perception
• non-native language
• speech in noise
• phonological competence

Declaration of interest: The author reports no conflict of interest. The author alone is responsible for the content and writing the paper.