Subjective criteria underlying noise-tolerance in the presence of speech.
Carol L Mackersie, Nahae Kayden Kim, Stephanie A Lockshaw and 1 others
PMID 32941072WHAT IT FOUND
Normal-hearing adults did not all use the same rule when background noise became unacceptable.
Most relied on distraction or annoyance, not speech interference, and loudness never dominated. Hearing aid users were not tested.
Key findings
01Across the sample, distraction and speech interference received the highest weighted ratings, followed by annoyance and loudness.
02Participants formed three groups with different dominant criteria: annoyance (21 participants, 33%), distraction (30 participants, 48%), and speech interference (12 participants, 19%); no participant rated loudness as the most important criterion.
03Noise-tolerance thresholds were highest for the annoyance-dominant group and lowest for the speech-interference-dominant group, while the groups did not differ significantly in Weinstein noise-sensitivity scores.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
The participants were young adults with normal hearing (ages 18-31 years), so the findings do not show how older adults or people with hearing loss judge noise tolerance. The sample was 51 female and 12 male, and the paper notes that sex differences in noise tolerance may affect the domain profiles. No hearing aid users or patients were tested, so the hearing aid noise reduction implications discussed by the authors are not supported by patient data. The study measured laboratory noise tolerance with one type of background noise, multi-talker babble, and the authors note that different noise types may change the domain profiles. Loudness ratings may have been reduced because speech was set to each participant's most comfortable loudness level. The three groups came from a cluster analysis chosen after an initial pattern analysis, so they should not be treated as fixed clinical types.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest. The article is listed as supported by NIH extramural research.
The easy way to misread this
Do not use this study to guide hearing aid noise reduction or patient counseling. It tested 63 young adults with normal hearing, not people with hearing loss, and no hearing aid processing was evaluated.