Understanding Speech in Background Noise

Healthy, Hearing, Speech Perception

Speech Perception, Speech Discrimination Tests, Hearing

The goal of this clinical trial is to establish how speech understanding is affected by background noise in people with normal hearing. The main questions it aims to answer are: * Does noise affect speech understanding similarly in all frequency regions? * Does adding noise cause speech understanding to fall away at a similar rate across frequencies? Participants will listen to speech in different frequency regions, with noise added at various levels, and respond with the words that they hear.

Participants will be seated comfortably throughout the experiment. Stimuli involving speech mixed with background noise at various levels will be played back from a PC and presented diotically over headphones at a level of approximately 65 dBA in each ear. Subjects will be instructed to repeat back each sentence, guessing if unsure. The experimenter will record component words correctly recalled. Sentences will not be repeated, and only exact-word matches will be accepted. A 10-minute practice stage will precede testing, in which subjects will hear example stimuli and sentences not used for testing. Test duration will not exceed two hours. Multiple groups of listeners will be employed, and the basic experimental protocol for each participant will be identical, differing only with regard to differences in the frequency content of the speech and/or the background noise present. Participants will be randomly assigned to groups.

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