title: Investigations into vocal doses and parameters pertaining to primary school teachers in classrooms.
abstract: Investigations into vocal doses and parameters were carried out on 40 primary school teachers (36 females and 4 males) in six schools in Italy, divided into two groups of three, A and B, on the basis of the type of building and the mid-frequency reverberation time in the classrooms, which was 1.13 and 0.79 s, respectively. A total of 73 working-day samples were collected (66 for females and 7 for males), from which 54 traditional lessons were analyzed separately. The average value over the working days of the mean sound pressure level of the voiced speech at 1 m from the teacher's mouth was 62.1 dB for the females and 57.7 dB for the males, while the voicing time percentage was 25.9 and 25.1 %, respectively. Even though the vocal doses and parameters did not differ for the two school groups, the differences in the subjective scores were significant, with enhanced scores in group B. A 0.72 dB increase in speech level per 1 dB increase in background noise level, L(A90), was found during traditional lessons, as well as an increase in the mean value of the fundamental frequency with an increase in L(A90), at a rate of 1.0 Hz/dB.
authors.affiliation: Politecnico di Torino, Energy Department, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi, 24, 10129 Torino, Italy. pasqualebottalico@yahoo.it
authors.forename: Pasquale
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Bottalico
authors.forename: Arianna
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Astolfi
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D004779:Environment Design; D005178:Faculty; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D018670:Monitoring, Ambulatory; D009622:Noise; D010465:Perception; D012574:Schools; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D013663:Teaching; D014831:Voice / Q000502:physiology*