Ritter R, Johnson R M, Northern J L
J Am Audiol Soc. 1979 Jan-Feb;4(4):123-31.
Controversy presently exists concerning the relationship between loudness discomfort levels (LDL's) and acoustic reflex thresholds (ART's). In this study, LDL's and ART's were obtained for two groups of ten normal-hearing adult subjects and one group of ten adult subjects with bilateral sensorineural hearing losses. The procedure involved obtaining LDL's and ART's under earphones and under sound field conditions for four different acoustic stimuli: pure tones, warble tones, spondaic words, and speech spectrum noise. One group of normal-hearing subjects and the hard-of-hearing group of subjects were given "too loud, uncomfortably loud, or annoyingly loud" LDL instructions while a second group of normal hearing subjects were instructed to respond when a sound "first starts to become uncomfortable." Results indicated that LDL's, irregardless of instructional pattern, were reported at consistently higher sound pressure levels than the ART's, for all groups of subjects. The magnitude of the differences between the LDL's and ART's varied according to LDL instrucitons, type of test stimulus, hearing sensitivity of the subjects (normal hearing or hard-of-hearing) and transducer used for stimulus presentation. The results of this study demonstrate that ART's correlate too poorly with the LDL to permit ART's to be used as an objective measure of loudness discomfort.
目前关于响度不适阈（LDL）与听觉反射阈（ART）之间的关系存在争议。在本研究中，对两组各十名听力正常的成年受试者以及一组十名患有双侧感音神经性听力损失的成年受试者进行了LDL和ART的测量。该程序包括在耳机和声场条件下，针对四种不同的声学刺激获取LDL和ART：纯音、啭音、重读音节词和言语频谱噪声。一组听力正常的受试者以及听力受损组的受试者收到的LDL指令为“太大声、令人不舒服地大声或令人烦恼地大声”，而另一组听力正常的受试者则被要求在声音“刚开始变得不舒服时”做出反应。结果表明，对于所有受试者组，无论指令模式如何，报告的LDL的声压级始终高于ART。LDL与ART之间差异的大小因LDL指令、测试刺激类型、受试者的听力敏感度（听力正常或听力受损）以及用于呈现刺激的换能器而异。本研究结果表明，ART与LDL的相关性太差，以至于不能将ART用作响度不适的客观测量指标。
