title: Noise hampers children's expressive word learning.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  To determine the effects of noise and speech style on word learning in typically developing school-age children.
  
  
  METHODS
  Thirty-one participants ages 9;0 (years;months) to 10;11 attempted to learn 2 sets of 8 novel words and their referents. They heard all of the words 13 times each within meaningful narrative discourse. Signal-to-noise ratio (noise vs. quiet) and speech style (plain vs. clear) were manipulated such that half of the children heard the new words in broadband white noise and half heard them in quiet; within those conditions, each child heard one set of words produced in a plain speech style and another set in a clear speech style.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Children who were trained in quiet learned to produce the word forms more accurately than those who were trained in noise. Clear speech resulted in more accurate word form productions than plain speech, whether the children had learned in noise or quiet. Learning from clear speech in noise and plain speech in quiet produced comparable results.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Noise limits expressive vocabulary growth in children, reducing the quality of word form representation in the lexicon. Clear speech input can aid expressive vocabulary growth in children, even in noisy environments.
authors.affiliation: Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA.
authors.forename: Kristine Grohne
authors.initials: KG
authors.lastname: Riley
authors.forename: Karla K
authors.initials: KK
authors.lastname: McGregor
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002663:Child Language; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D007807:Language Tests; D008297:Male; D009622:Noise; D013060:Speech; D013067:Speech Perception; D014825:Vocabulary