BICTEL/e - ULg
Serveur institutionnel des thèses de doctorat

• noise
• classroom listening
• children
• speech in noise
• room acoustics
• impaired voice
• dysphonia
• auditory working memory
• listening comprehension
• speech perception
• Spoken language processing

Listening to a speaker under acoustically adverse conditions is challenging for children. At school, children may often find themselves exposed to high background noise levels or teachers who suffer from voice disorders. This PhD thesis investigated the isolated and combined effects of noise and a speaker’s impaired voice quality on spoken language processing in normally-developing school-aged children from the age of 6 years. The aim is to shed light on their speech perception (i.e., their ability to map auditory information onto linguistic units, such as phonemes or words), listening comprehension (i.e., their ability to understand the content of longer utterances) and auditory working memory (i.e., their ability to memorize and recall verbal information) under conditions of noise and/or a speaker’s impaired voice. The outcomes that are assessed are children’s answer accuracy and response times in listening tasks. In a series of five studies, including a systematic literature review and a meta-analysis, a methodological study, and three experimental studies, we show that children make more processing errors and tend to require more time to understand spoken language when listening to speech in noise and/or a speaker’s impaired voice. The combined interference of noise and impaired voice is particularly disruptive. Importantly, even when children understand the speaker, acoustic interference can reduce their processing speed, which indicates an increased listening effort. This thesis highlights that children’s listening efficiency strongly depends on the acoustic quality of the speech input. Especially regarding the educational context, monitoring background noise levels and teachers’ vocal health are vital steps toward promoting children’s learning outcome and making classroom listening a more rewarding activity for them.

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