Speech intelligibility in the classroom: effects of listener age and teacher voice

The purpose of this study was to determine if listener age (graduate students vs. third graders) and teacher voice (three teachers) affected word recognition in atypical classroom. For the graduate students, word recognition scores were uniformly good at all locations within the classroom and for all three teachers.For the third graders, word recognition scores were significantly poorer than for the graduate students. The word recognition scores depended complexly on the teacher's speaking voice and her ability to control the noise in the classroom. It Also depended on the classroom row, with word recognition being poorest in the lastrow. The results of the present study provide evidence that acquisition of listening skills is not complete by third grade and that the lack of maturation/ability combines with factors related to the teacher's voice and the classroom acoustics to reduce word recognition.The acoustic characteristics of the classroom did not meet ASHA criteria,however the characteristics of the classroom were good in comparison to classrooms described by other investigators. The results suggest that if classrooms,such as the test classroom, are to be used in the future, there is the need to understand the interaction of acoustic characteristics with talker and listener factors.An alternative approach would be to improve the listening environment with classroom amplification systems or FM systems to overcome the problems created by talker and listener factors in poor acoustic environments.