Speech recognition in noise and reverberation by school-age children

The present study examined the effects of noise (S/N ratio = +2 and +6 dB) and reverberation time (Rt = 0.0 and 0.8 s) on monaural speech recognition in normal-hearing school-age children (aged 8-10 years) using sentence materials. Our data confirm the results of other studies which suggest that the typical acoustic conditions existing in classrooms do not permit adequate speech recognition. The introduction of a typical level of classroom reverberation significantly reduced speech recognition in both levels of noise. These results have implications regarding the clinical assessment of communicative function in hearing-impaired children.