Interaction effect of background sound type and sound pressure level on children of primary schools in the Netherlands

Dadi Zhang*, Martin Tenpierik, P.M. Bluyssen

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

20 Citations (Scopus)
45 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

The acoustic conditions of classrooms received a lot of attention in the last decades because of its important role in school children's comfort and performance. In a previous field study of 54 classrooms from 21 schools in the Netherlands, more than 85% of the 1145 primary school children reported that they were bothered by noise in the classroom. The objective of this study is to identify the effect of background sounds on children's performance, sound evaluation and influence assessment based on a lab study conducted in the SenseLab. 335 school children (9 to 13 years old)from the previous studied schools participated in the lab study. They were subjected to a series of listening tests and evaluations in two acoustic test chambers (acoustically treated or untreated)with one of seven randomly played background sounds: 45 dB(A)or 60 dB(A)traffic noise, 45 dB(A)or 60 dB(A)children talking, 45 dB(A)or 60 dB(A)music, or no sound (≈30 dB(A)). A two-way ANOVA was applied to analyse the interaction effect of sound type and sound pressure level (SPL)on children's performance, sound evaluation and influence assessment in each of the chambers. Statistically significant interactions between the impact of sound type and SPL on children's phonological processing performance and their influence assessments were found in the untreated chamber.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)161-169
Number of pages9
JournalApplied Acoustics
Volume154
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2019

Bibliographical note

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Keywords

  • Interaction effect
  • Music
  • Noise
  • Phonological processing
  • Primary school children
  • Sound pressure level

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