Noisy houses with televisions blaring and traffic roaring by can stunt children’s ability to read, a study suggests. A new study has found that too much background noise in a home or school can make it hard for toddlers to learn new words.
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The researchers in this previous study had young children listen to recordings of people reading and talking.
“Our study suggests that adults should be aware of the amount of background speech in the environment when they’re interacting with young children”.
Toddlers do not fare well in environments with too much noise, finds new study.
Children living in noisier homes have been found to have worse school reports, and higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol in their blood, and higher heart rates than children from more peaceful homes.
Although it’s almost impossible for children to be in a completely quiet environment, as suggested by the study, parents may benefit from doing their best to reduce the amount of background noise their children experience in the home in order to maximize their language learning experience.
EurekAlert reported that the study imitated noisy environments that the toddler may be faced while they were at their homes or schools.
For the study, 106 children aged 22 to 30 months took part in three experiments.
They were then tested on their ability to recognize the objects when they were labelled. In another experiment, the researchers first tried to teach children two new words in a quiet environment by reading the words in a sentence. Finally, the children were shown two different images and were asked to look at the image that corresponded to the new word they had learned.
The researchers found that among two sets of 40 toddlers, those exposed to quiet background speech or quiet background noise successfully learned new words. The last group was exposed to two words in a quiet environment and then taught meanings of four words, two of which were the ones they were exposed to, in a noisy environment. Not only do poor children hear fewer words than rich ones-the gap is estimated to reach 30 million words by age 3-they are more likely to live in loud environments, as McMillan and Saffran write. A third experiment solidified these findings and showed that toddlers older than 26 months were still only able to learn new words and their meanings in quiet environments.
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Their study also suggests that while loud background speech impairs the toddlers’ ability to learn words, cues in the environment may help overcome this challenge. “Hearing new words in fluent speech without a lot of background noise before trying to learn what objects the new words corresponded to may help very young children master new vocabulary”, suggests Jenny Saffran, College of Letters & Science Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who coauthored the study.
