Noise Pollution: Impeding Learning And Focus

Noise pollution can have a detrimental impact on a child's learning and cognitive development. Studies have shown that children in schools located near sources of noise pollution, such as aircraft or traffic, tend to have lower reading scores than children in quieter schools. Noise can also affect a child's speech perception and listening comprehension, with younger children being more susceptible to these issues. In addition, noise can cause distractions, making it difficult for children to focus on their tasks and potentially leading to lower academic performance. Furthermore, noise can impact teachers as well, causing voice fatigue and contributing to frustration and burnout. Overall, noise pollution can create a negative learning environment, particularly for students with hearing or learning difficulties.

Speech perception

Psychoacoustic studies have found that children need more favourable listening conditions than adults to decode and process oral information. They require higher signal-to-noise ratios to achieve comparable levels of speech identification as adults. This is especially true for children with language or attention disorders and those learning a second language.

Noise-induced disruptions in speech perception can also impact children's performance in complex listening tasks, such as executing oral instructions or comprehending discourse. These tasks require semantic and syntactic processing of oral information to develop a coherent mental model of the story's meaning. Noise can impair a child's ability to perform these tasks effectively, even when speech identification is not affected.

The impact of noise on speech perception has practical implications for the design of classrooms and schools. Excessive noise and reverberation in classrooms can negatively affect children's listening performance and should be addressed through appropriate acoustical design.

Listening comprehension

Psychoacoustic studies have shown that children's speech perception is more impaired than adults' by unfavourable listening conditions. Children need a higher signal-to-noise ratio to achieve comparable levels of identification of speech or non-speech signals, with adult-like performance reached at about 6 years of age. However, for maskers that vary over time or fluctuate, such as single-talker speech, adult-like performance is not reached until around 10 years of age.

Children are also less able to use spectro-temporal and spatial cues to separate signal and noise. This is due to their immature auditory selective attention skills, which contribute to their difficulties with speech-in-noise perception. Children with language or attention disorders, or those learning a second language, are even more impaired by noise in speech perception tasks.

Noise-induced disruption has also been found in non-auditory tasks, such as short-term memory, reading and writing. For example, studies have shown that immediate serial recall of visually presented verbal items is impaired by task-irrelevant sounds, such as single-talker speech and non-speech sounds like tones or instrumental music.

The effects of noise on learning are cumulative, and enduring exposure to noise may cause persisting deficits in children's cognitive development. For instance, studies have found that children in schools affected by aircraft noise did not learn to read as well as those in quiet schools, as they struggled with acquiring speech recognition skills.

Non-auditory tasks

Noise pollution has been found to negatively impact children's performance in non-auditory tasks.

In a study, children were given a task to serially recall lists of visually presented items. The results showed that the children's performance was negatively impacted by task-irrelevant sounds. The impact was more pronounced in younger children, with second-graders showing a 39% performance drop compared to 11% in adults.

Another study found that children exposed to moderate-intensity environmental noise performed worse in academic tasks. Third-graders exposed to babble noise scored lower in reading, spelling, arithmetic, and attention tests compared to those in quiet environments. However, the results were inconsistent, as some studies found no effect or even improved performance in certain tasks with noise present.

Overall, noise pollution can impair children's short-term memory and performance in non-auditory tasks, with younger children being more susceptible to the negative effects.

Verbal tasks

Noise pollution has been shown to have a negative impact on children's performance in verbal tasks. This is especially true for children with language or attention disorders, or those learning a second language.

A study by Klatte et al. (2010a) found that elementary school children experienced substantial decrements in their ability to execute complex oral instructions when exposed to single-talker speech and classroom noise. Similarly, a study by Valente et al. (2012) found that 8- to 12-year-olds experienced significant impairments in discourse comprehension when exposed to broadband noise combined with reverberation. These impairments could not be attributed to impaired identification, but rather to the extra resources required to identify degraded speech, which then become unavailable for encoding, storage, and processing of information.

The impact of noise on verbal tasks is particularly notable in children as their cognitive functions are less automated and thus more prone to disruption. Children's immature auditory selective attention skills also contribute to their difficulties with speech-in-noise perception.

The effects of noise on verbal tasks are not limited to the duration of exposure. Chronic exposure to noise can also have long-term effects on children's cognitive development, particularly in the areas of reading and pre-reading skills. Studies have shown that enduring exposure to noise in early childhood can affect the development of basic language functions, which are crucial for reading acquisition.

To mitigate the negative impacts of noise on children's verbal tasks, it is important to create quiet learning environments. This may involve working with noise control consultants and architects to implement solutions such as acoustical tile ceilings, wall coverings, and bookshelves to absorb sound.

Reading performance

Noise pollution has been shown to have a detrimental effect on children's reading performance. In a study by Gary Evans and Lorraine Maxwell at Cornell University, it was found that children in schools affected by aircraft noise did not learn to read as well as those in quieter schools. The researchers compared children in a noisy school (in the flight path of a major international airport) with similar students in a quiet school and found that children in the noisy school had difficulty acquiring speech recognition skills, impacting their ability to learn to read.

Dr. Arline Bronzaft and Dr. Dennis McCarthy's landmark study in 1975 found that students' reading scores were affected by noise. They examined the reading scores of children in a school where classes were located adjacent to elevated train tracks and compared them with the reading scores of students on the quiet side of the school. The researchers found that by sixth grade, the students on the noisy side of the school tested one year behind those on the quiet side. In a follow-up study in 1981, noise abatement had been put in place, and it was found that reading scores between the two groups were then equal.

The Acoustical Society of America has found that in many classrooms in the United States, up to 25% of information can be missed because of excessive noise and reverberation. This has a particularly detrimental effect on children with language or attention disorders and second-language learners, who are more impaired than age-matched controls.

The effects of noise on reading performance are cumulative, and the impact of poor classroom acoustics on very young students can be devastating. Poor classroom acoustics are frustrating for both students and teachers.

Frequently asked questions