The impact of background speech varying in intelligibility: Effects on cognitive performance and perceived disturbance

Abstract

Noise abatement in office environments often focuses on the reduction of background speech intelligibility and noise level, as attainable with frequency-specific insulation. However, only limited empirical evidence exists regarding the effects of reducing speech intelligibility on cognitive performance and subjectively perceived disturbance. Three experiments tested the impact of low background speech (35 dB(A)) of both good and poor intelligibility, in comparison to silence and highly intelligible speech not lowered in level (55 dB(A)). The disturbance impact of the latter speech condition on verbal short-term memory (n = 20) and mental arithmetic (n = 24) was significantly reduced during soft and poorly intelligible speech, but not during soft and highly intelligible speech. No effect of background speech on verbal-logical reasoning performance (n = 28) was found. Subjective disturbance ratings, however, were consistent over all three experiments with, for example, soft and poorly intelligible speech rated as the least disturbing speech condition but still disturbing in comparison to silence. It is concluded, therefore, that a combination of objective performance tests and subjective ratings is desirable for the comprehensive evaluation of acoustic office environments and their alterations.

Keywords:

• office noise
• cognitive performance
• irrelevant speech
• speech intelligibility
• noise abatement
• auralisation

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express their appreciation to Ruth Sichert for programming and servicing the experimental software as well as for data collection. Thanks go to Alexandra Feil for preparatory experimental work on the performance tests used in Experiments 2 and 3.