Noise hampers children's expressive word learning.

Area of Science:

• Child language acquisition
• Auditory perception
• Speech processing

Background:

• Effective vocabulary acquisition is crucial for school-age children's academic success.
• Auditory challenges, such as background noise, can impede learning processes.
• Speech clarity plays a role in how easily children process and learn new linguistic information.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the impact of background noise and speech style on word learning in typically developing school-age children.
• To determine if clear speech can mitigate the negative effects of noise on children's word learning.
• To analyze the interaction between noise conditions and speech styles in vocabulary acquisition.

Main Methods:

• Thirty-one children aged 9-10 years learned novel words presented in narrative discourse.
• Participants were exposed to words in either quiet or broadband white noise conditions.
• Speech style was manipulated between plain and clear speech for word presentation.

Main Results:

• Children learned word forms more accurately when trained in quiet compared to noise.
• Clear speech led to more accurate word form production than plain speech, regardless of noise.
• Learning outcomes for clear speech in noise were comparable to plain speech in quiet.

Conclusions:

• Background noise negatively impacts children's expressive vocabulary growth and lexical representation quality.
• Clear speech input enhances children's vocabulary development, even when exposed to noise.
• Optimizing auditory environments and speech clarity can support children's language learning.