- October 07, 2026
- By Rachael Grahame ’17
With the support of a two-year, $725,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health, a University of Maryland research team will explore whether a noisy home helps or hurts young children’s speech.
“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,” said Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences Professor Rochelle Newman. “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.”
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 — who 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 and 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.
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 at ldev@umd.edu.