Effects of speech signal content and speaker gender on acceptance of noise in listeners with normal hearing

Abstract

Objective: The purpose of this research was to determine if the content and/or speaker gender of a running speech sample affected the acceptance of background noise within a participant.

Design: A male and a female recording of the Arizona Travelogue (Cosmos Inc.) and the ipsilateral competing message (ICM) from the synthetic sentence identification with ICM were created and used as the experimental speech signals. Two acceptable noise level measurements were obtained and averaged for each condition. Twenty-one participants rated interest level in the speech sample for each condition.

Study sample: Forty-three listeners with normal hearing participated.

Results: Interest level was significantly greater for the ICM than the Arizona Travelogue speech samples, and was significantly greater for female samples. Neither the content of the sample nor the gender of the speaker significantly affected the most comfortable level or the acceptable noise level.

Conclusions: Findings suggest that the acceptable noise level can be measured using various types of speech signals for normal-hearing listeners.