What did you say? Children’s spoken language processing in noise and speaker’s poor voice

The rational of this study was to assess separate and combined effects of background noise and speaker’s impaired voice quality (i.e. dysphonia) on children’s spoken language processing. Fifty-three 5-6 year-old children individually performed a speech perception task and a listening comprehension task in a 2x2 factorial design with the factors noise (no noise / noise at 0 dB signal-to-noise ratio) and voice quality (normophonic speaker/dysphonic speaker). We measured children’s task performance and response times (RT) in these tasks. Noise and impaired voice significantly lowered performance and prolonged RT in speech perception, especially when combined. For listening comprehension, we found a significant interaction between noise and voice quality on task performance: Noise lowered performance, but only in the case of the dysphonic voice. Results highlight that noise and impaired voice may negatively affect children’s spoken language processing in different processing areas, with the effect being most pronounced when the two factors occur together. This has relevance for the educational setting, because classrooms are typically noisy and there is a high prevalence of voice problems among teachers.