EFFECTS OF CLASSROOM NOISE AND REVERBERATION ON THE SPEECH PERCEPTION OF BILINGUAL CHILDREN LEARNING IN THEIR SECOND LANGUAGE

摘要

Understanding speech through noise is a skill that develops well into a child's adolescent years and becomes adult-like at approximately the age of 15. The developmental listening disadvantage for younger children is of particular concern in schools because the teaching of early educational skills may take place in noisy settings. Furthermore, bilingual children learning in their second language (L2) appear to be at a double jeopardy when listening under adverse conditions (noise, reverberation, background babble). In fact, these children, in a short space of time, generally acquire the same lexical and morpho-syntactic skills, as their monolingual peers, but they don't reach an identical level of phonological skills in L2. The aim of this study was to determine the effects of noise on speech perception skills in 15 typically developing immigrant children, (aged 6-10) learning through their L2, and to compare the results with those relative to 15 monolingual, Italian-only-speakers (IO) matched peers.