Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47408, USA.
Department of Linguistics, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon 97403-1290, USA.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2022 May;151(5):3496. doi: 10.1121/10.0011394.
Noise in healthcare settings, such as hospitals, often exceeds levels recommended by health organizations. Although researchers and medical professionals have raised concerns about the effect of these noise levels on spoken communication, objective measures of behavioral intelligibility in hospital noise are lacking. Further, no studies of intelligibility in hospital noise used medically relevant terminology, which may differentially impact intelligibility compared to standard terminology in speech perception research and is essential for ensuring ecological validity. Here, intelligibility was measured using online testing for 69 young adult listeners in three listening conditions (i.e., quiet, speech-shaped noise, and hospital noise: 23 listeners per condition) for four sentence types. Three sentence types included medical terminology with varied lexical frequency and familiarity characteristics. A final sentence set included non-medically related sentences. Results showed that intelligibility was negatively impacted by both noise types with no significant difference between the hospital and speech-shaped noise. Medically related sentences were not less intelligible overall, but word recognition accuracy was significantly positively correlated with both lexical frequency and familiarity. These results support the need for continued research on how noise levels in healthcare settings in concert with less familiar medical terminology impact communications and ultimately health outcomes.
医疗环境中的噪声，如医院，通常超过卫生组织建议的水平。尽管研究人员和医疗专业人员已经对这些噪声水平对口语交流的影响表示关注，但缺乏关于医院噪声中行为可理解性的客观测量。此外，在医院噪声中的可理解性研究中没有使用医学相关术语，与言语感知研究中的标准术语相比，这些术语可能会对可理解性产生不同的影响，并且对于确保生态有效性至关重要。在这里，使用在线测试对 69 名年轻成年听众在三种听力条件下（即安静、语音噪声和医院噪声：每种条件下 23 名听众）进行了可理解性测量，共四种句子类型。三种句子类型包括具有不同词汇频率和熟悉度特征的医学术语。最后一组句子包括与医学无关的句子。结果表明，两种噪声类型都对可理解性产生了负面影响，医院噪声和语音噪声之间没有显著差异。总体而言，与医学相关的句子并没有更难理解，但单词识别准确率与词汇频率和熟悉度都呈显著正相关。这些结果支持需要继续研究医疗环境中的噪声水平与不太熟悉的医学术语如何影响沟通，最终影响健康结果。
