CHINESE WORD IDENTIFICATION PERFORMANCE OF CHILDREN IN DIFFERENT CLASSROOM ACOUSTICAL ENVIRONMENTS

Chinese word recognition performance was assessed by children in grades 2, 4 and 6 ( 7 to 12 years old) in the 4 existing typical elementary school classrooms in Guangzhou, China. Chinese word recognition scores were obtained at each test conditions in these typical classrooms with a range of reverberation time (RT) and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The results show that the word recognition scores increase with the decrease of RT, increase with the increase of SNR, and increase with the increase of age of children. RT, SNR and the age of children have significant influences on the Chinese word recognition scores of children. The SNR has more significant influence on the Chinese word recognition scores than RT and age of groups.