Di Domenico, Alberto

Garraffa, Maria

Pellegatti, Matteo

Prodi, Nicola

Visentin, Chiara

University of East Anglia digital repository

Sentence comprehension and word recall in noisy primary classroom: what is the effects of the individual cognitive competences?C. Visentin(a), M. Pellegatti(a), M. Garraffa(b), A. Di Domenico(c), N. Prodi(a) (a) Department of Engineering, University of Ferrara, Italy(b) School of Health Sciences, University of East Anglia, UK(c) Department of Psychological, Health and Territorial Sciences, University of Chieti, ItalyBackground and study motivations• Acoustic conditions in classroom are often suboptimal (long reverberation time, highbackground noise level).• The effort required in such conditions to hear what the teacher is saying may leave fewerresources for other, more complex tasks (e.g., comprehension, memorization).• The Ease of Language Understanding framework suggests that the effect of listeningconditions on auditory tasks might be modulated by individual competences of thelisteners.• The mediation effect of individual competences on task performance should be apparent inboth task performance and listening effort.MethodsParticipants 120 primary school children (two schools in Ferrara, Italy):- age: 8 yrs (n=28, grade 3)- age: 9 yrs (n=62, grade 4)- age: 10 yrs (n=30, grade 5)Study aimsWith reference to children aged 8 to 10 years, performing an auditory task in presence of aninternal background noise:1. Is there an effect of age and listening condition on task performance ?2. Is the effect of listening condition mediated by the following individual competencesi. cognitive skills (inhibitory control)ii. linguistic skills (reading comprehension)iii. self-rated noise sensitivityTake home messagesData analysis Repeated measures design: LMMs or GLMMs.- fixed factors: listening condition (SNR), age- random factor: participantPost hoc: pairwise comparisons (Bonferroni correction)TasksResults: word recallResults: sentence comprehension• Significant effect of the listening condition(worse performance in SNR=1 dBcompared with SNRs=5, 9 dB)• Significant effect of the children’s age(worse performance for 8- and 9-year-oldscompared with the oldest students)• Planned post hoc comparisons: the effectof age is significant only for the leastfavorable SNRs (1 and 5 dB)Main effects p valueListening condition <0.001 ***Age <0.001 ***Results: self-rating of effort in sentence comprehensionMain effects p valueListening condition n.s.Age 0.007 **• No significant effect of listeningcondition on the self-ratings of effort,despite the presence of differences intask performance.• Significant effect of children’s age:younger children (8 years old) rate thetask as more effortful than olderchildren (10 years old).Results: correlation with individual competencesSentence comprehension Word recall Self-ratings of effortInhibitory control - main effect- no interaction (SNR)- main effect- no interaction (SNR)- main effect- no interaction (SNR)Linguistic skills - main effect- no interaction (SNR) no effects no effectsNoise sensitivity no effects no effects no effectsIndividual competences (and their interaction with SNR) were included in the statistical models, toexamine the presence of a mediation effect.• Significant effect of SNR only for the sentence comprehension task. The chosen word recalltask might be too easy for the children, thus preventing to observe an effect of the listeningconditions.• Inhibitory control and linguistic skills never mediated the effect of listening condition on taskperformance. However, the presence of a main effect indicates that children with lowercognitive competences are vulnerable to the effects of an informative noise, independently onthe SNR.• No significant effect of noise sensitivity on the considered outcomes: the WSNN scale might notbe specific enough to be related to measures of performanceMain effects p valueListening condition n.s.Age 0.004 **• No effect of the listening condition duringthe comprehension task on theperformance in the subsequent word recalltask• Significant effect of age (young children – 8and 9 years – recall less words than 10-year-olds)LISTENING ANSWER«The boy chases the dog and the cat»5 sentences of different syntactic complexity sentence comprehension word recallcats girl dogcat boy appleListening conditions - acoustic simulations of a primary school classroom with Tmid = 0.73 s-background noise: two intelligible talkers (two children speaking simultaneously around the listener)- three SNRs: +1, +5, +9 dBProcedures Children collectively presented with the tasks in theirclassrooms. One week after the experimental session:measures of individual cognitive competences in quiet.self-rating of listening effort“How much effort did it take to understand the sentences?”Inhibitory control:• assessment of the individual capacity of selectivelyattending on a stimuli and suppressing attention to otherstimuli.• go/no go task presented in the auditory domain.Assessment of the individual competencesAll results were categorized as low/high based on a median split of the distributionLinguistic skills:• assessment of the individual proficiency in a readingcomprehension task (reading short stories and answeringto multiple-choice questions)• skills assessed in the visual domainNoise sensitivity:• reduced Italian version of the Weinstein Noise SensitivityScale (based on five statements).

Sentence comprehension and word recall in noisy primary classroom: What is the effect of the individual cognitive competences?

https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/83110/1/POSTER_SPIN_2022.pdf

Sentence comprehension and word recall in noisy primary classroom: What is the effect of the individual cognitive competences?

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

University of East Anglia digital repository