The Relation Between Duration of Exposure to High Level Noise and Listener Accuracy

摘要

The experiment was designed to discover whether noise exposure results in impaired listening ability in a situation in which the individual remains in the noise environment and the listening test stimuli are presented at a constant level with respect to the noise level. For this purpose, four Listening-in-Noise tests were administered to an experimental and a control group. Between tests, the experimental subjects removed their headphones in the presence of the test noise; the control subjects removed their headphones when the testing noise was cut off and spent the interval between tests in quiet. Within both groups, subjects were exposed to noise and tested over a fifty-minute period while others were tested over a period of three hours and twenty-five minutes. During either period, listener performance was not affected by exposure to noise between tests. The performances of experimental and control groups were parallel from test to test. During the fifty-minute period, successive test scores were significantly different; during the three-hour and twenty-five minute period, successive test scores were not significantly different. (Author)