Experimental measurements of word intelligibility of pre-school children under acoustic interferences of reverberation and background noise

• Published in: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 2017-05, Vol.141 (5), p.3482-3483
• Main Authors: Kawai, Keiji, Harada, Kazunori
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0001-4966; 1520-8524
• DOI: 10.1121/1.4987255

Child day-care rooms require optimum acoustic condition as children from 0 to 5 years old are supposed to be vulnerable group against interferences with verbal communication by background noise and excessive reverberation. However such interferences on the children seem not to have been examined in the field of architectural acoustics. Thus on-site experiments were carried out to measure word intelligibility of children from 3 to 5 years old. The procedure was like a true or false game. Each of the test words was mixed with two or three levels of pink noise and convolved with the room impulse responses with different reverberation times. The words were presented to the children and control groups (elementary school pupils and college students) by a loudspeaker in a daycare room. They were asked to judge whether the word was food or not, and to raise their hands holding yes or no signs. The experiment was repeated three times in different daycare centers with revisions of the condition settings. As the results, the correct answer ratios of pre-school children was lower than that of control groups, in general, and particularly, the ratio of 3-years-old children was much lower than that of other groups. Also under low S/N ratio conditions the ratios of all the groups decreased along with long reverberation.