Effect of Reverberation and Age on Speech Recognition and Working Memory Skills of School Going Children

Abstract

Classroom listening conditions are critical for effective learning, but children often struggle to understand speech in noisy and reverberant environments. This study aimed to investigate how reverberation and age affect both speech recognition and working memory in school children. Using a controlled experimental setup simulating typical classroom acoustics, 60 children divided into three age groups of 20 each (8–8.11, 9-9.11 and 10-10.11 years) were tested on speech perception tasks and verbal working memory span tasks under varying reverberation times (RT) and signal-to-noise ratios (SNR). RT was determined based on acoustic noise measurements in Indian school classrooms. Speech stimuli and masking noise were presented from either the same location or with spatial separation to measure spatial release from masking. Results showed that speech recognition scores decreased significantly with increasing RT and lower SNR, and that younger children performed significantly poorer than older children under comparable conditions. Introducing spatial separation between the target speech and competing noise sources improved intelligibility relative to co-located conditions. Similarly, working memory performance declined when reverberation was long and SNR was poor, whereas older children exhibited greater memory spans than younger children under identical listening conditions. These findings demonstrate that both acoustic factors (reverberation, noise level, spatial configuration) and developmental changes can significantly influence speech perception and cognitive processing in classroom environments. The results highlight the need to mitigate excessive reverberation and noise in Indian classrooms to support effective learning and communication for all students.