The Week – Anna Vlasits
“More than 40 years ago, psychologists found signs that children living in noisy places were having trouble learning to read. They suspected that the noise interfered with language learning. Now, their suspicions have been confirmed, this time in the lab. The original experiment, published in 1973, looked at children living in four unique apartment buildings in New York City. The Bridge Apartments, on the Manhattan side of the George Washington Bridge, sit directly on top of Interstate 95. At the time of the study, the researchers wrote, “open highway vents and vertical surfaces of the buildings produce[d] high noise levels and an ‘echo chamber’ effect.” On the bottom floor of the buildings, the noise was as loud as having a blender on all the time — 85 decibels.”(more)