Subjective and objective speech intelligibility investigations in primary school classrooms / Astolfi A.; Bottalico P.; Barbato G.. This work concerns speech intelligibility tests and measurements in three primary schools in Italy, one of which was conducted before and after an acoustical treatment. Speech intelligibility scores (IS) with different reverberation times (RT) and types of noise were obtained using diagnostic rhyme tests on 983 pupils from grades 2-5 (nominally 7-10 year olds), and these scores were then correlated with the Speech Transmission Index (STI). The grade 2 pupils understood fewer words in the lower STI range than the pupils in the higher grades, whereas an IS of $97% was achieved by all the grades with a STI of 0.9. In the presence of traffic noise, which resulted the most interfering noise, a decrease in RT from 1.6 to 0.4 s determined an IS increase on equal A-weighted speech-to-noise level difference, S/N(A), which varied from 13% to 6%, over the S/N(A) range of À15 to þ6 dB, respectively. In the case of babble noise, whose source was located in the middle of the classroom, the same decrease in reverberation time leads to a negligible variation in IS over a similar S/N(A) range.
In REF , the authors investigate speech intelligibility in primary schools, in the presence of various types of noise that are common in a classroom, such as traffic noise, room babble and fan coil noise.
Subjective and objective speech intelligibility investigations in primary school classrooms
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
Physics Medicine