Larry Hyde

Critique Article 1
December 23, 2019
For Quantitative Design
Prof. De Los Santos

Reference:
Lewis, D.E., Manninen, C.M., Valente, D.L., and Nicholas A. Smith, N.A.,(2014). Children’s
Understanding of Instructions Presented in Noise and Reverberation, American Journal of Audiology,
Vol. 23. 326–336.

The abstract was easily understandable, and clearly written. The results summarized therein were
clearly what would have been expected, following an expected hierarchy of complexity with regards to
noise levels, levels of reverberation, and multiplicity of competing conversations, masking.

The Method was also extremely well written and straight-forward so as to invite very little opportunity
for misunderstandings. This simplification followed, as well the methods for instrumentation
throughout the study. It follow the procedures identically to an earlier study by Wrobelski, 2013, which
included completely controlled, non-classroom sound conditions. That is, in the interests of “control”, a
real classroom was NOT used. Only simulated conditions. In other words, a hope and a prayer that
simulated conditions matched the real classroom conditions that children face. These conditions were
described, on a technical basis. The task follows a referential task described by Bunce, 1989 for
following instructions. The measurement task was quite impressive for its naturalness and face
validity. As well the scoring really could not be randomly correct, but depended upon correct
comprehension of the instruction. They showed scorer reliability scores which were very high. But,
moving to the results the subject scores also show high ranges of variability, with many students
scoring at 100%. Highly suspect? Still, the results did answer the question one may have had about
the reasonableness of the task for all students. That is, scores were very high when the task was
“easy” with no distraction and reverberation.

I can just also interject here, that MY study task, which both propose to measure under “somewhat”
the same listening conditions, are both presenting noise and reverberation interference. In both cases
these interference were quantified. But my conditions were real. Their conditions were only
speculative. Their conditions were apparently consistent and controlled. Mine were highly variable
with real classroom conditions. He states, himself that, for example, the noise only condition, was
designed to test the children’s listening performance under otherwise idyllic. It is worthy goal create
something they call noise, defined by having recordings of a certain number of talkers in a room. But
that may be an incomplete definition of noise. And it exactly limited to that condition. A better way to
define noise is test listening in many normal classrooms, and assess the variety of those conditions.
And they also have limited the frequency response to 125Hz to 6.5kHz, which may not be complete,
until we know it is complete. It is just conjecture, otherwise. The noise condition they created was a
convolved impulse response, with spoken babble added by a babbling device. This is a contrived
notion of noise. It is missing the locational variables. It is an undefined notion of what is noise. Is it
missing important, measurable features like room harmonic distortion? Sound baffling. They go on
lable a sound reverberation level of 600ms as the reverberation condition. In our school this would be
an ideal condition. To omit normal features of background noise, and then call it noise may be a
serious miscalculation.,

Of course, to me, the discussion is weak, based on the limitations I mentioned above. And in fact, the
very findings he is surprised about, like the similarity of “interference” results between the single talker
and Multiple talker results. It may be related to a set of errors. The competing noise results
contrasted most significantly with multiple talkers only when reverberation was added. Presenting the
speech signal at 65dB, at 5dB below during the competing noise, may still be heard. The competing
noise at 5dB higher may not be masking the original signal, since the original signal may loud enough
to hear most of the time, at least for some listeners.

The appendices of this article may be especially helpful to me, since they show the entire descriptive
dialogue being used, and I am open to better set of comprehension questions.