Effects of Aircraft Noise on Reading and Quality of Life in Primary School Children in Germany: Results From the NORAH Study

A review of the literature shows that our knowledge concerning effects of chronic aircraft noise exposure on children is still limited and does not allow well-founded predictions for children living in specific noise-exposed areas. In this study, we investigated effects of aircraft noise on cognition and quality of life in 1,243 second graders from 29 schools around Frankfurt/Main Airport in Germany. Although exposure levels at schools were below 60 dB and thus considerably lower than in previous studies, multilevel analyses revealed that increasing exposure was linearly associated with less positive ratings of quality of life, increasing noise annoyance, and decreasing reading performance. A 20 dB increase in aircraft noise exposure was associated with a decrease in reading scores of one fifth of a standard deviation, corresponding to a reading delay of about 2 months. No effects were found for verbal precursors of reading acquisition. Teachers’ reports (N = 84) indicate that severe disruptions of classroom instruction due to aircraft noise may contribute to the effect on reading.

[1]  G. Evans.  The environment of childhood poverty. , 2004, The American psychologist.

[2]  T. Lachmann,et al.  Effects of noise and reverberation on speech perception and listening comprehension of children and adults in a classroom-like setting. , 2010, Noise & health.

[3]  Migration background and educational tracking , 2013 .

[4]  D. Grayden,et al.  Effect of Age and Cognition on Childhood Speech in Noise Perception Abilities , 2006, Audiology and Neurotology.

[5]  T. Lachmann.  Reading Disability as a Deficit in Functional Coordination , 2001 .

[6]  E. Lebret,et al.  Neurobehavioral effects of transportation noise in primary schoolchildren: a cross-sectional study , 2010, Environmental health : a global access science source.

[7]  Ingmar Hosenfeld,et al.  Stichwort: Kompetenzentwicklung im Grundschulalter , 2008 .

[8]  K. Dimakopoulou,et al.  Annoyance due to aircraft noise has increased over the years--results of the HYENA study. , 2009, Environment international.

[9]  Staffan Hygge,et al.  The effects of road traffic and aircraft noise exposure on children's episodic memory: the RANCH project. , 2010, Noise & health.

[10]  John Schacter,et al.  Paying for High- and Low-Quality Teaching. , 2004 .

[11]  Jenny Head,et al.  Does Traffic-related Air Pollution Explain Associations of Aircraft and Road Traffic Noise Exposure on Children's Health and Cognition? A Secondary Analysis of the United Kingdom Sample From the RANCH Project , 2012, American journal of epidemiology.

[12]  Thomas Lachmann,et al.  Reading as functional coordination: not recycling but a novel synthesis , 2014, Front. Psychol..

[13]  J. Seidel,et al.  Effects of Classroom Acoustics on Performance and Well-Being in Elementary School Children: A Field Study , 2010 .

[14]  P. Bryant,et al.  Categorizing sounds and learning to read—a causal connection , 1983, Nature.

[15]  Sylke V. Schnepf,et al.  Immigrants’ educational disadvantage: an examination across ten countries and three surveys , 2007 .

[16]  Lorraine Maxwell,et al.  Chronic Noise Exposure and Reading Deficits , 1997 .

[17]  Robert Tibshirani,et al.  Bootstrap Methods for Standard Errors, Confidence Intervals, and Other Measures of Statistical Accuracy , 1986 .

[18]  Mathias Basner,et al.  Aircraft noise effects on sleep: application of the results of a large polysomnographic field study. , 2006, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[19]  R. Mathar,et al.  Classification, Data Analysis, and Data Highways , 1998 .

[20]  Lorraine E. Maxwell,et al.  THE EFFECTS OF NOISE ON PRE-SCHOOL CHILDREN'S PRE-READING SKILLS , 2000 .

[21]  Staffan Hygge,et al.  Chronic Noise Exposure and Physiological Response: A Prospective Study of Children Living Under Environmental Stress , 1998 .

[22]  van Kempen Eemm,et al.  Health implication of road, railway and aircraft noise in the European Union : Provisional results based on the 2nd round of noise mapping , 2014 .

[23]  T. Lachmann,et al.  Does noise affect learning? A short review on noise effects on cognitive performance in children , 2013, Front. Psychol..

[24]  Nikki L. Aikens,et al.  Socioeconomic Differences in Reading Trajectories: The Contribution of Family, Neighborhood, and School Contexts. , 2008 .

[25]  Bruce D. McCandliss,et al.  Socioeconomic background modulates cognition-achievement relationships in reading. , 2006, Cognitive development.

[26]  D. Share.  Phonological recoding and self-teaching: sine qua non of reading acquisition , 1995, Cognition.

[27]  Staffan Hygge,et al.  A Prospective Study of Some Effects of Aircraft Noise on Cognitive Performance in Schoolchildren , 2002, Psychological science.

[28]  P. Paz-Alonso,et al.  Development of attention networks and their interactions in childhood. , 2014, Developmental psychology.

[29]  Jenny Head,et al.  Longitudinal effects of aircraft noise exposure on children's health and cognition: A six-year follow-up of the UK RANCH cohort , 2013 .

[30]  J. Hox.  Multilevel analysis: Techniques and applications, 2nd ed. , 2010 .

[31]  J. Ziegler,et al.  Speech-perception-in-noise deficits in dyslexia. , 2009, Developmental science.

[32]  Selcuk R. Sirin.  Socioeconomic Status and Academic Achievement: A Meta-Analytic Review of Research , 2005 .

[33]  P. Alku,et al.  Long-term exposure to occupational noise alters the cortical organization of sound processing , 2005, Clinical Neurophysiology.

[34]  Hugh Davies,et al.  Noise and cardiovascular disease: a review of the literature 2008-2011. , 2012, Noise & health.

[35]  Marco Zorzi,et al.  Modelling reading development through phonological decoding and self-teaching: implications for dyslexia , 2014, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[36]  Anders Kjellberg,et al.  Poor Listening Conditions Impair Memory for Intelligible Lectures: Implications for Acoustic Classroom Standards , 2009 .

[37]  Marita Gareis,et al.  Bildung in Deutschland , 2010 .

[38]  S. Ellis Weismer,et al.  Language deficits in poor comprehenders: a case for the simple view of reading. , 2006, Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR.

[39]  A. Schick,et al.  Effects of irrelevant speech and traffic noise on speech perception and cognitive performance in elementary school children. , 2007, Noise & health.

[40]  B S Pasternack,et al.  Effects of aircraft noise on reading ability of school-age children. , 1982, Archives of environmental health.

[41]  P. H. Seymour,et al.  Foundation literacy acquisition in European orthographies. , 2003, British journal of psychology.

[42]  Jenny Head,et al.  Exposure-effect relations between aircraft and road traffic noise exposure at school and reading comprehension: the RANCH project. , 2006, American journal of epidemiology.

[43]  T. Eikmann,et al.  Aircraft Noise and Quality of Life around Frankfurt Airport , 2010, International journal of environmental research and public health.

[44]  T. Lachmann,et al.  Different letter-processing strategies in diagnostic subgroups of developmental dyslexia , 2008, Cognitive neuropsychology.

[45]  H. Entorf,et al.  What a Difference Immigration Policy Makes: A Comparison of PISA Scores in Europe and Traditional Countries of Immigration , 2005 .

[46]  Monica Melby-Lervåg,et al.  Phonological skills and their role in learning to read: a meta-analytic review. , 2012, Psychological bulletin.

[47]  J Head,et al.  Aircraft and road traffic noise and children's cognition and health: a cross-national study , 2005, The Lancet.

[48]  M. Bullinger,et al.  Assessing health-related quality of life in chronically ill children with the German KINDL: first psychometric and content analytical results , 1998, Quality of Life Research.

[49]  Aircraft and road traffic noise and children's cognition , 2005, The Lancet.

[50]  U. Frith.  Beneath the Surface of Developmental Dyslexia , 2017 .

[51]  Gösta Bluhm,et al.  Aircraft Noise and Incidence of Hypertension , 2007, Epidemiology.

[52]  R. Bradley,et al.  Socioeconomic status and child development. , 2002, Annual review of psychology.

[53]  R F Job,et al.  Chronic aircraft noise exposure, stress responses, mental health and cognitive performance in school children , 2001, Psychological Medicine.

[54]  Mike Greyling,et al.  The impact of aircraft noise exposure on South African children's reading comprehension: the moderating effect of home language. , 2012, Noise & health.

[55]  Stephen Stansfeld,et al.  The Effect of Transportation Noise on Health and Cognitive Development:A Review of Recent Evidence - eScholarship , 2007 .

[56]  Patrik Sörqvist,et al.  A 3 year update on the influence of noise on performance and behavior. , 2012, Noise & health.

[57]  Joop J. Hox,et al.  Multilevel modeling: When and why , 1998 .

[58]  S A Stansfeld,et al.  Multilevel modelling of aircraft noise on performance tests in schools around Heathrow Airport London , 2002, Journal of epidemiology and community health.