Speech Discrimination in Noise: The Influence of Hearing Protection
John G. Casali, Matthew James Horylev · Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting · 1987
A psychoacoustic study was performed to determine speech discrimination performance in several noise conditions with the use or non-use of industrial hearing protection. The independent variables included: (1) subject hearing configuration (unoccluded and earplug-, earcap-, or earmuff-occluded), noise intensity level (60, 83 dBA), and noise spectral type (low frequency, white, high frequency). Subjects' hearing level was used as a blocking variable. All factors were found to significantly influence speech discrimination performance, as measured using phoneme scoring. These are discussed in some detail in the paper.