Effects of Looking Behavior on Listening and Understanding in a Simulated Classroom

Audiovisual cues can improve speech perception in adverse acoustical environments when compared to auditory cues alone. In classrooms, where acoustics often are less than ideal, the availability of visual cues has the potential to benefit children during learning activities. The current study evaluated the effects of looking behavior on speech understanding of children (8-11 years) and adults during comprehension and sentence repetition tasks in a simulated classroom environment. For the comprehension task, results revealed an effect of looking behavior (looking required versus looking not required) for older children and adults only. Within the looking-behavior conditions, age effects also were evident. There was no effect of looking behavior for the sentence-repetition task (looking versus no looking) but an age effect also was found. The current findings suggest that looking behavior may impact speech understanding differently depending on the task and the age of the listener. In classrooms, these potential differences should be taken into account when designing learning tasks.