title: [Speech discrimination in environment-specific noise].
abstract: Taking into account the changes in language discrimination due to specific environmental noise of varying quality, we determined the influence of cocktail party noise, traffic noise and factory noise by means of free field adjusted headphones, thus analysing the discrimination of monosyllables for different types and degrees of noise in normal and pathological hearing. The results confirm that language discrimination without specially considering noise interference does not satisfactorily describe actual communication conditions in the everyday life of those with disturbed hearing. Even noise interference using a speech-related spectral distribution or white noise cannot sufficiently simulate the actual interference quality in everyday life. Cocktail party noises proved useful to register frequent selection interference in language-similar surroundings. For specific interference influence, additional street noise or factory noise may be used. With regard to standardisation of noise interference, comparative examination of language-simulating noise available as test noise on every normal language cassette should be performed. The present study underlines, to say the least, that for comprehension of language discrimination disturbances in the presence of noise interference, a broad-spectrum range of possible noise should be available for a comprehensive coverage of the manifold communications situations that can arise.
mesh_terms: D001309:Auditory Threshold; D006319:Hearing Loss, Sensorineural / Q000175:diagnosis*; D006801:Humans; D009622:Noise / Q000009:adverse effects; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D012931:Social Environment; D013063:Speech Discrimination Tests
vernacular_title: Untersuchungen zur Sprachdiskrimination bei umweltspezifischen Störgeräuschen.