Sound environment

This study is aimed at the effects on children’s auditory cognition of the acoustic environments they are exposed to daily.

Title	Effects of school acoustics
Level of evidence	Direct
What	Activity based settings: seven primary classes  (three schools) Acoustic conditions of real-life settings in classroom: 91 preschool children ages three to six in Germany
Approach	Activity based settings: Noise in classrooms is produced by classroom activities as well as by outdoor environmental noise. The first part of this deliverable is related to classroom noise due to environmental noise, and the second part to noise produced by classroom activities. RWTH’s research investigated activity-based acoustics in pre- and primary schools, examining how classroom noise environments change with different activities. Specifically, acoustic measurements were conducted and analyzed for both educational facilities. Then, children’s speech perception and listening effort in activity-based acoustic situations were investigated in listening experiments. Measurements were conducted outdoors and indoors to investigate sound propagation into a university classroom and the influence of different source distributions. Acoustic conditions of real-life settings in classroom: Study into how listening experiments investigating children’s auditory cognition can be designed more realistically to create a representative measure of the conditions in classrooms. Therefore, two paradigms have been introduced. On the one hand, an established child appropriate paradigm examining the intentional switching of spatial auditory selective attention (Loh et al., 2021) has been extended to examine stress reflected in heart rate variability as well as to be suitable for preschool children. On the other hand, a novel paradigm was developed in this project examining listening effort and speech intelligibility in children.