Investigations into vocal doses and parameters pertaining to primary school teachers in classrooms

• Published in: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 2012-04, Vol.131 (4), p.2817-2827
• Main Authors: Bottalico, Pasquale, Astolfi, Arianna
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Acoustics; Adult; Analysis of Variance; Architectural acoustics; Environment Design; Exact sciences and technology; Faculty; Female; Fundamental areas of phenomenology (including applications); Humans; Male; Middle Aged; Monitoring, Ambulatory; Noise; Perception; Physics; Schools; Speech Acoustics; Surveys and Questionnaires; Teaching; Voice - physiology
• ISSN: 0001-4966; 1520-8524
• DOI: 10.1121/1.3689549

Investigations into vocal doses and parameters were carried out on 40 primary school teachers (36 females and 4 males) in six schools in Italy, divided into two groups of three, A and B, on the basis of the type of building and the mid-frequency reverberation time in the classrooms, which was 1.13 and 0.79s, respectively. A total of 73 working-day samples were collected (66 for females and 7 for males), from which 54 traditional lessons were analyzed separately. The average value over the working days of the mean sound pressure level of the voiced speech at 1m from the teacher's mouth was 62.1dB for the females and 57.7dB for the males, while the voicing time percentage was 25.9 and 25.1%, respectively. Even though the vocal doses and parameters did not differ for the two school groups, the differences in the subjective scores were significant, with enhanced scores in group B. A 0.72dB increase in speech level per 1dB increase in background noise level, L A90 , was found during traditional lessons, as well as an increase in the mean value of the fundamental frequency with an increase in L A90 , at a rate of 1.0Hz/dB.