Source: New Scientist magazine, issue #2081
CHILDREN who live in noisy areas have poorer reading skills than those in quieter areas. Now researchers at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, are suggesting that this is because they find it harder to recognize and understand human speech.
In the first study to explain how noise and reading ability are linked, Gary Evans and Lorraine Maxwell compared 58 seven and eight-year-olds from a school which lies in the flight path of one of New York City's airports with 50 children of the same age from a quiet neighborhood.
They gave the children a variety of reading and hearing tests. For example, the children had to identify certain words in a list, read out nonsense words to show their grasp of consonant-vowel combinations and identify recorded words that were partially obscured by static. All the tests were carried out in a quiet place.
As expected, the children from the noisy neighborhood had poorer reading skills. But the researchers also found that those children found it harder to recognize and understand spoken words. They conclude that in order to cope with the din, the children near the airport cut down the burden of noise they were being subjected to by "filtering out" certain sounds which include human speech.
Because reading skills are in part acquired by listening to others, ignoring speech hampers their development. Researchers believe that by listening to speech, children learn to distinguish phonemes, the distinct sounds that work together to make up a word—such as the three phonemes which make up the word "cat". Once children have developed this ability from listening to speech, they can apply it to text.
Arline Bronzaft, a noise specialist at the City University of New York, says the researchers' findings would probably apply to schools near any large airport. "It doesn't matter where you are—London, the Netherlands or Los Angeles—this study is very significant," she says, because of the link that it establishes between noise exposure and language development.
The research, to be published in the journal Environment and Behavior, could provide new ammunition to groups that want to strengthen restrictions on noise from airports and other sites. Supporters of more stringent noise restrictions have had difficulty proving that noise really is harmful, and the Cornell study will give them a big boost, says Bronzaft.
However, several previous studies, by Evans and others, have found evidence of high blood pressure and levels of the hormone adrenaline, which is linked to stress, in people exposed to noise for long periods.
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