Are children with stronger cognitive capacity more or less disturbed by classroom noise and dysphonic teachers?

Abstract

Purpose: This study aimed to explore if dysphonic voice quality affects children's performance on a language comprehension test, the Test for Reception of Grammar-2 (TROG-2), performed in simultaneous background noise (non-semantic babble). A further aim was to investigate the role of Working Memory Capacity (WMC) and Executive Functioning (EF) in coping with the voice against a background of babble conditions.

Method: Ninety-three mainstreamed 8 year old children with typical language development were tested for WMC and EF. Two groups of children (n = 47/46) were formed and presented with recordings of TROG-2 instructions read by one female speaker: one group was presented with recordings with induced dysphonic voice quality, the other with recordings of typical voice. Both groups listened to the voice recordings in competing babble noise at a Signal-to-Noise Ratio of + 10 dB.

Result: Significant differences were found for the interaction between cognitive capacity and the TROG-2 results in relation to the voice conditions. In the dysphonic voice condition, children with better WMC results scored higher at the easier comprehension tasks. In the typical voice condition, children with better WMC and EF results scored higher on the more difficult tasks. Seventeen per cent of the variance for the TROG-2 results was explained by the WMC and EF results. There was no overall effect on the children's performance depending of voice condition.

Conclusion: The effect of the speaker's voice quality on children's performance varies depending on the prevalence of background babble noise and on the task demands. The dysphonic voice and babble noise seem to demand allocation of cognitive capacities at the cost of language comprehension.

Keywords::

• Language comprehension
• working memory capacity
• voice

Acknowledgements

This work is performed within the Linnaeus Research Environment, Cognition, Comprehension and Learning (CCL). Parts of the results in this article were previously published in Swedish (2014) as a Master thesis in Logopedics at Lund University. The authors would like to thank the master thesis authors: speech-language pathologists Maria Langvik and Julia Wellershouse. Further, we are indebted to PhD student Susanna Whitling for performing the vocal loading and to the speech-language pathologists who performed the voice assessments. The authors would also like to express their deep gratitude to Dr Janet Baker, speech-language pathologist, who revised the manuscript for language and consistency and to the reviewers for valuable comments on the manuscript.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.