School of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, USA.
Int J Audiol. 2021 Feb;60(2):89-95. doi: 10.1080/14992027.2020.1813909. Epub 2020 Sep 17.
The objective was to determine the relative contribution of four criteria (loudness, annoyance, distraction, speech interference) to participants' noise-tolerance thresholds (NTT).
While listening to speech in noise set at the highest signal-to-noise ratio at which noise became unacceptable (noise tolerance threshold), participants completed paired-comparison judgments of loudness, annoyance, distraction, and speech interference to determine the noise domain(s) that were most important in their noise tolerance judgments. Participants also completed absolute ratings of the noise using the same noise domains, which were combined with the paired comparison data for analysis.
Sixty-three adults with normal hearing participated.
For the entire group, speech interference and distraction were the largest contributors to noise tolerance. A cluster analysis indicated three distinct groups: criteria were dominated by either annoyance (33%); distraction (48%), or speech interference (19%). Significant differences in NTT among the groups revealed the highest mean NTT for the annoyance group and lowest NTT for the speech interference group.
The majority of participants based NTTs on criteria related to the noise itself (annoyance or distraction) and had greater noise sensitivity than the smaller group of participants who focused more on speech intelligibility in the noise.
目的是确定四个标准（响度、烦恼、分心、言语干扰）对参与者噪声容限阈值（NTT）的相对贡献。
在聆听噪声设置为最高信噪比的情况下，参与者完成了响度、烦恼、分心和言语干扰的配对比较判断，以确定在噪声容限判断中最重要的噪声域。参与者还使用相同的噪声域对噪声进行了绝对评级，这些评级与配对比较数据一起进行了分析。
63 名听力正常的成年人参与了研究。
对于整个组，言语干扰和分心是噪声容忍度的最大贡献者。聚类分析表明有三个不同的组：标准主要由烦恼（33%）、分心（48%）或言语干扰（19%）决定。组间 NTT 的显著差异表明，烦恼组的平均 NTT 最高，言语干扰组的 NTT 最低。
大多数参与者基于与噪声本身（烦恼或分心）相关的标准来确定 NTT，并且比那些更关注噪声中言语可懂度的较小组参与者对噪声更敏感。
