• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.40 no.3
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• pp.201-212
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• 2021

The present study was conducted as a pilot investigation to suggest the standards of acoustic performance for classrooms suitable for incomplete hearing people such as children under 9 years of age. Subjective evaluations such as questionnaire and speech intelligibility test were conducted to 264 students at two elementary schools in Cheong-ju in order to analyze the characteristics of the listening environment in the classrooms of the lower grades in elementary school. The survey was undertaken with a total of 264 students at two elementary schools in Cheong-ju, and investigated their satisfaction with the classroom listening environment. As a result, students responded that the most helpful information type for understanding class content is the voice of teacher. In addition, the volume of the current teacher's voice is normal, and the level of clarity is highly satisfactory. As for the acoustic performance of the classroom, the opinion that the noise was normal and the reverberation was very short was found to be dominant in overall satisfaction with the listening environment. Meanwhile, as a result of speech intelligibility test using the word list selected for the lower grade students of elementary school, it could be inferred that the longitudinal axis distance from the sound source in the case of 8-year-olds is a factor that affects speech recognition.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.40 no.1
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• pp.18-30
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• 2021

The ultimate goal of the present study is to establish the acoustical performance standards of classroom for the elderly who are incomplete hearing people. As a pilot survey, the present study was conducted to investigate the listening environment and the actual condition of speech perception performance of education facilities for elderly, Acoustic performances of two education facilities for elderly in Cheongju were measured and questionnaire survey was done to elderly people. Also, speech intelligibility tests were undertaken by Consonant Vowel Consonant (CVC) and Phonetically Balanced Words (PBW) methods. The questionnaire survey showed that the elderly were satisfied with the listening environment of the educational facilities in general. Also, it was found that acoustical performances satisfy with the acoustic criteria of general classrooms in Korea. However, the results of the speech intelligibility test showed that the scores of elderly were significantly lower than twenties with normal hearing. It was also revealed that the scores are reduced as the age increases. Thus, it was concluded that the acoustical performance standards of educational facilities for the normal hearing were not suitable for educational facilities for the elderly.