Benefits of good classroom acoustics on Italian second-grade readers

The need of tuning into speech in noisy and reverberant classrooms is a challenge for good speech communication and literacy development at school. In particular, reading development can be compromised if children are exposed to inadequate acoustics. This is true for normally developing children and for children with potential reading disorders, as dyslexia, which is likely to be due to impairments in phonological processing. According to the recently formalized “rise-time theory”, phonological impairments are due to difficulties in processing the amplitude modulation of the speech sound structure. The role of good acoustics in the classroom is therefore crucial, as it contributes to preserve the amplitude modulation of the speech signal from the teacher to the pupils at different linguistical temporal rates (i.e. phonemes, syllables, stressed syllables and phrases), acting as an enhancer of the auditory processing at the basis of reading. This work attempts to investigate on the relationship between classroom acoustics and the reading abilities of 94 Italian second-graders. Speech clarity C50 resulted significantly correlated with the reading speed scores of words, non-words, sentences and text, while no significant correlations were found with reverberation time.