Does a Noisy Home Negatively Impact Children’s Language Development?

UMD researchers’ new study explores whether a noisy home helps or hurts little ones’ speech.

With the support of a two-year, $725,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health, University of Maryland Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences Professor Rochelle Newman is working alongside other Terps to potentially help parents of young children feel better about how noisy their homes are.

“In terms of vocabulary, there’s this belief that if a child is in a home that is noisy, then they probably have had fewer opportunities to learn words, and therefore may have less vocabulary. We believe that a little noise might actually be good for you; that you might need some experience with noise to learn from noisy environments in the future,” Newman explained. “In a school setting, for example, a student needs to know how to listen to the teacher when there are others around them.”

To determine whether their hypothesis is true, Newman and her co-investigators plan to study the relationship between the noise that 100 DMV-area children ages 20 to 36 months hear at home, and their language development outcomes in a lab setting.

The researchers — which include Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology Assistant Professor Rachel Romeo and former UMD postdoctoral researchers Meg Cychosz and Katie Von Holzen — will send the children home with a recording device for one day, and then ask them to visit Newman’s Language Development & Perception Lab for three assessments. These assessments will focus on the child’s ability to recognize a word in a quiet room; the child’s ability to recognize a word in a noisy environment; and whether they can recall in a quiet environment the words they learned from someone reading them a book containing words they’ve never heard before in a noisy environment.

Noise in the home won’t be measured just by volume. Instead, noise will be measured by how often a caregiver speaks to the child in a quiet environment versus how often a caregiver speaks to the child in the presence of other sounds, such as a TV or other children talking or playing in the background. Parents will be asked to fill out a survey about their home environment, too. Survey questions concern how many TVs are in the house; how often they listen to music or the radio in the home; how many people are living in the home; what the square footage of the home is; what zip code they live in, to determine their proximity to major roadways, airports, railroad tracks or other sources of transportation noise; and more.

The researchers already piloted a smaller study of children using the at-home recording devices.  

“In the pilot, we didn’t bring the kids into the lab, but we did send them home with a recorder, and we found that while some kids got 90% of their speech input in relatively quiet situations, other kids got only 50% of their speech input in quiet situations. It was really variable, which was interesting considering the pilot study participants didn’t reflect a broad representation of homes. These were all children from high socioeconomic-status homes,” said Newman.

Newman said there’s a belief that homes belonging to families of a lower socioeconomic status are generally noisier, and that that has a negative impact on the speech development of the children living in those homes. The researchers think their study may debunk that belief.

“I think one of my favorite things about this project is that it takes an adaptive approach, rather than a deficit perspective. Many research studies assume that certain experiences — especially those that occur more often in lower-income communities — cause ‘deficits’ in children. Instead, this study proposes that children adapt to their early environments, whatever they might be, in a way that makes sense for their own successful learning,” said Romeo.

The researchers hope that their findings will be a comfort to those parents who put extra pressure on themselves to make their home an optimal learning environment.

“It might be reassuring to a lot of parents that moderate amounts of noise are perhaps positive, or at least not negative,” said Newman. “You probably don't have to have the perfect quiet home as long as a child has some time to learn in quiet times.”

To learn more about participating in the study, email the Language Development and Perception Lab: ldev@umd.edu. 

Photo by iStock 

Published on Wed, Oct 7, 2026 - 1:10PM