Listening Comprehension in Background Noise in Children with Normal Hearing

In typical school classrooms, children are required to listen in environments with poor acoustics and to process and comprehend complex messages from the teacher and from peers in order to achieve academic success. To predict children’s listening abilities in the classroom, research is warranted to begin to examine the specifi c aspects of comprehension that are most affected when listening in background noise. Comprehension tasks include (1) listening for the main idea, (2) identifying the details, (3) inferring information, (4) defi ning vocabulary, and (5) determining the most pertinent information. There is an existing measure that provides normative data from children with normal hearing when performing these fi ve aspects of comprehension in a quiet environment (Bowers, Huisingh, & LoGiudice, 2006); however, to our knowledge, there is no test measure to examine these components of listening comprehension in the presence of background noise. As a result, we examined the fi ve aforementioned areas of listening comprehension in background noise in eighteen, sixto ten-year-old children with normal hearing. The results suggested that children’s listening comprehension is signifi cantly affected by the presence of excessive (i.e., -5 dB signal-to-noise ratio) background noise, but different patterns of results were found across the subtests. Children had the greatest diffi culty in the details, reasoning, and understanding messages subtests.