Influence of classroom acoustics on the phonological and reading skills in primary school children

Purpose: In this research project, we address the question of how and whether the classroom acoustic environment influences the phonological awareness and/or the reading skills in early childhood. The phonological awareness, a meta-cognitive skill essential for the processing of sounds (phoneme) in language, represents a good predictor of success in learning to read. This ability is acquired progressively until at least the early years of primary school. A key process to achieve an appropriate phonology level stems by the possibility of correctly hearing the phonemes. Method: This study involved around 100 pupils, aged 7, from the five II-grade classrooms of three primary schools in Torino (Italy). Pupils involved attended lessons in classrooms with different acoustic conditions, in terms of reverberation time and speech intelligibility, which is defined as the proportion of speech that is understood by a listener. Results and Conclusion: The work conducted so far allowed administrating the reading tests and acoustically characterizing the classrooms. Preliminary results show that pupils attending lessons under poorer classroom acoustic conditions exhibit worst performances than their peers in better classroom acoustic conditions for the reading skills tested based on several tests. This study is a primary attempt to assess relationships between cognitive abilities and classroom acoustics and surely still needs to be deepened with further investigations, however the goals achieved so far are strongly encouraging.