FOR RELEASE: April 28, 1997
Contact: Susan Lang
Office: (607) 255-3613
Internet: [email protected]
Compuserve: Larry Bernard 72650,565
http://www.news.cornell.edu
ITHACA, N.Y. -- Children in schools bombarded by frequent aircraft noise
don't learn to read as well as children in quiet schools, Cornell
University researchers have confirmed. And they have discovered one major
reason: kids tune out speech in the racket.
"We've known for a long time that chronic noise is having a devastating
effect on the academic performance of children in noisy homes and schools,"
says Gary Evans, an international expert on environmental stress, such as
noise, crowding and air pollution. "This study shows that children don't
tune out sound per se, rather they have difficulty acquiring speech
recognition skills."
Evans and his collaborator, Lorraine Maxwell, both environmental
psychologists, are in the Department of Design and Environmental Analysis
in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell.
Evans and Maxwell compared children in a noisy school (in the flight path
of a New York international airport) with similar children in a quiet
school. Unlike in other studies, both groups of children were tested in
quiet conditions. By doing so, the researchers showed that the link
between chronic noise and reading scores is the chronic noise exposure --
not noisy episodes that might have occurred during the testing sessions.
Evans and Maxwell, whose study will be published in Environment and
Behavior later this year, compared a total of 116 first and second graders
from two elementary schools. One school was battered by peaks of up to 90
decibels of noise every 6.6 minutes by low-flying planes passing overhead.
The other school, closely matched for ethnicity and percentage of children
receiving subsidized school lunches and speaking English as a second
language, was in the same urban area but in a quiet neighborhood. Only
children for whom English was their first language were included in the
study.
Each child was first given an auditory screening test. They were
subsequently tested for abilities to read, distinguish words with
background noise, distinguish sounds with background noise and distinguish
word sounds (phonemes) under quiet conditions. The tests, with the
exception of the initial auditory test, were conducted by Elissa Tolle and
Pegauy Santil, 1996 Cornell graduates in human ecology, who were both
seniors at the time. When the data were analyzed, the researchers
controlled for mother's education.
"Interestingly, the findings were only significant for speech perception
amidst noise, not sound perception" says Maxwell. "This implies that
language acquisition is an underlying, intervening mechanism that accounts
for some of the noise-reading deficit link."
Evans and Maxwell also suspect that other factors may be at work in noisy
schools and neighborhoods, such as teacher and parent irritability and
their reluctance to talk as much, use as many complete sentences and read
aloud as often as other teachers and parents.
Both researchers stress the need to reestablish an office of noise
abatement within the Environmental Protection Agency; such an office was
abolished during the Reagan administration. They point to other health
concerns related to chronic noise, including hearing damage, chronic
cardiovascular activation, elevated annoyance and irritation, motivation
problems such as learned helplessness, and impaired cognitive development
and reading achievement.
"These effects have all been well documented," says Evans. "Unfortunately,
we're experiencing exponential increases in worldwide, ambient noise levels
that are a byproduct of economic development, particularly prevalent among
economically underdeveloped countries."
The research was supported by the Cornell College of Human Ecology and the
National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and the U.S. Department of
Agriculture.
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