Effects of Background Noise on Speech and Language in Young Adults

Telling Stories in Noise: The Impact of Background Noises on Spoken Language for People With Aphasia

PURPOSE

The purpose of this study was to determine how different background noise conditions affect the spoken language of participants with aphasia during a story retell task.

METHOD

Participants included 11 adults with mild to moderate aphasia and 11 age- and gender-matched controls. Participants retold stories in a silent baseline and five background noise conditions (conversation, monologue, phone call, cocktail, and pink noise). Dependent measures of speech acoustics (fundamental frequency and mean intensity), speech fluency (speech rate and disfluent words), and language production (correct information units [CIUs], lexical errors, lexical diversity, and cohesive utterances) were compared between groups and across conditions.

RESULTS

Background noise resulted in higher fundamental frequency (fo) and increased mean intensity for control participants across all noise conditions but only across some conditions for participants with aphasia. In relation to language production, background noise interfered significantly more with communication efficiency (i.e., percent CIUs) for participants with aphasia than the control group. For participants with aphasia, the phone call condition led to decreased lexical diversity. Across groups, condition effects generally suggested more interference on speech acoustics in conditions where continuous noise was present and more interference on language in conditions that presented continuous informational noise.

CONCLUSIONS

Although additional research is needed, preliminary findings suggest that background noise interferes with narrative discourse more for people with aphasia (PWA) than neurologically healthy adults. PWA may benefit from therapy that directly addresses communicating in noise.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.23681703.

Listening to White Noise Improved Verbal Working Memory in Children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: A Pilot Study

Existing research demonstrates that children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) underperform in cognitive tasks involving working memory (WM) due to hypo-arousal, which has led to the development of arousal regulation models to determine proper levels of arousal and optimal cognitive outcomes. The present study focuses on investigating the effects of external auditory stimuli on verbal WM in children with ADHD. Thirteen children with ADHD (aged 6–10 years old) and thirteen age- and gender-matched children with typical development (TD) completed the verbal WM task when listening to no sound, white noise, or pleasant music. A two-way repeated-measures analysis of variance was used to compare the verbal WM performance between groups in the three auditory conditions. Children with ADHD showed the best verbal WM performance when listening to white noise and the worst performance when listening to no sound. Yet, children with TD performed the best in the no-sound condition and the worst in the white noise condition. Our findings suggest auditory white noise is beneficial for ideal arousal regulation and cognitive performance involving verbal WM for children with ADHD and support the moderate brain arousal model. Providing external white noise is a non-invasive and cost-effective approach to improving verbal WM in children with ADHD in real-world contexts.