Effects of Noise on Speech Perception and Spoken Word Comprehension

Abstract

The aim of the study was to find out which of the three categories of noise acting as maskers ( energetic : masking portions of the target speech with its energy; informational : both target and masker compete for the listener’s attention; degraded : reverberated or filtered speech) is most detrimental to speech perception and spoken word comprehension. To that end, participants completed three tasks with and without added noise – listening span, listening comprehension, and shadowing – where shadowing is considered primarily a task relying on speech perception, with the other two tasks considered to rely on word comprehension and semantic inference. The study found informational masking to be most detrimental to speech perception, while energetic masking and sound degradation were most detrimental to spoken word comprehension. The results also imply that masking categories must be used with caution, since not all maskers belonging to one category had the same effect on performance.