Children who live in noisy areas have poorer reading skills than those in quieter areas. Now researchers at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., are suggesting that this is because they find it harder to recognize and understand human speech.

In the first study to explain how noise and reading ability are linked, Gary Evans and Lorraine Maxwell compared 58 7- and 8-year-olds from a school that lies in the flight path of one of New York City's airports with 50 children of the same age from a quiet neighborhood.They gave the children a variety of reading and hearing tests. For example, the children had to identify certain words in a list, read out nonsense words to show their grasp of consonant vowel combinations and identify recorded words that were partially obscured by static. All the tests were carried out in a quiet place.

As expected, the children from the noisy neighborhood had poorer reading skills. But the researchers also found that those children found it harder to recognize and understand spoken words. They conclude that in order to cope with the din, the children near the airport cut down the burden of noise they were being subjected to by "filtering out" certain sounds, including human speech.

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Because reading skills are in part acquired by listening to others, ignoring speech hampers their development. Researchers believe that by listening to speech, children learn to distinguish phonemes, the distinct sounds that work together to make up a word - such as the three phonemes that make up the word "cat." Once children have developed this ability from listening to speech, they can apply it to text.

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