The acoustic characteristics of a school classroom may have an influence on the cognitive developmental processes in children, as well as on the voicing demand in teachers. High reverberation times and excessive background noise levels negatively affect speech communication and can be the causes of psychophysical diseases in both students and teachers. Recent studies highlighted the correlation between the occupational voice use and the occurrence of voice pathologies, however there is still a lack in the studies that accounted for all the aspects that are present in the everyday communication situations and that are based on repeated and accurate voice monitorings in-field. The objective of this Ph.D. thesis is to contribute to the identification of tools, procedures and requirements to address all the issues related to healthcare and safety related to the teaching and learning practices in school classrooms. This approach includes to account for every possible cause of health risk among which the work- and stress-related problems appear, negatively affecting the teaching activity and reducing speech intelligibility towards pupils. The first part of the research activity within these three years was oriented to the investigation of the voice use under very different acoustic conditions. Experiments were performed both in laboratory and in-field. In particular, measurements took place in the semi-anechoic and reverberant rooms of the National Institute of Metrological Research (INRiM) in Torino and repeatedly in primary school classrooms located in the North of Italy. Within this framework, the calibration procedures for the accurate estimation and measurement of voice parameters were defined for a new portable vocal analyser that was recently developed. The second part of the research was addressed to the investigation of speech intelligibility under several acoustic conditions. At this aim, the validation of a new speech intelligibility test that is accurate for repeated measurements and that was optimised in several languages based on the same algorithm, was performed. This test was validated within a joint project with the Oldenburg Universität (Germany) and, afterwards, was implemented to finalise a listening test aimed at understanding the effect of reverberation and noise with informational content on speech intelligibility.

Speech communication in classrooms: Long-term monitoring of the vocal activity of teachers and intelligibility of children / Puglisi, GIUSEPPINA EMMA. - (2016).

Speech communication in classrooms: Long-term monitoring of the vocal activity of teachers and intelligibility of children

PUGLISI, GIUSEPPINA EMMA
2016

Abstract

The acoustic characteristics of a school classroom may have an influence on the cognitive developmental processes in children, as well as on the voicing demand in teachers. High reverberation times and excessive background noise levels negatively affect speech communication and can be the causes of psychophysical diseases in both students and teachers. Recent studies highlighted the correlation between the occupational voice use and the occurrence of voice pathologies, however there is still a lack in the studies that accounted for all the aspects that are present in the everyday communication situations and that are based on repeated and accurate voice monitorings in-field. The objective of this Ph.D. thesis is to contribute to the identification of tools, procedures and requirements to address all the issues related to healthcare and safety related to the teaching and learning practices in school classrooms. This approach includes to account for every possible cause of health risk among which the work- and stress-related problems appear, negatively affecting the teaching activity and reducing speech intelligibility towards pupils. The first part of the research activity within these three years was oriented to the investigation of the voice use under very different acoustic conditions. Experiments were performed both in laboratory and in-field. In particular, measurements took place in the semi-anechoic and reverberant rooms of the National Institute of Metrological Research (INRiM) in Torino and repeatedly in primary school classrooms located in the North of Italy. Within this framework, the calibration procedures for the accurate estimation and measurement of voice parameters were defined for a new portable vocal analyser that was recently developed. The second part of the research was addressed to the investigation of speech intelligibility under several acoustic conditions. At this aim, the validation of a new speech intelligibility test that is accurate for repeated measurements and that was optimised in several languages based on the same algorithm, was performed. This test was validated within a joint project with the Oldenburg Universität (Germany) and, afterwards, was implemented to finalise a listening test aimed at understanding the effect of reverberation and noise with informational content on speech intelligibility.
2016
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11583/2643670
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