Subjective criteria underlying noise-tolerance in the presence of speech

Objective: The objective was to determine the relative contribution of four criteria (loudness, annoyance, distraction, speech interference) to participants’ noise-tolerance thresholds (NTT). Design: 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. Study Sample: Sixty-three adults with normal hearing participated. Results: 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. Conclusion: 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.