Investigating individual susceptibility to the detrimental effects of background noise and reverberation in simulated complex acoustic environments

On a daily basis, individuals perform a variety of tasks in complex acoustic environments that contain background noise and reverberation. Previous research has demonstrated that, when tested in a laboratory setting, background noise and reverberation impair speech recognition and disrupt cognitive processing. These detrimental effects are especially pronounced for young children, older adults, and individuals with hearing loss. However, the specific environmental and individual factors that account for performance declines in the presence of background noise and reverberation, and whether these relations are generalizable to real-world complex acoustic environments, remains poorly understood. In the present study, children and adults performed speech recognition and speech comprehension tasks amidst background noise and reverberation in a state-of-the-art virtual sound room (ViSoR). ViSoR contains a Variable Room Acoustics System, which simulates the acoustic properties of real-world environments in a free-field test setting. Participants also completed standardized measures of attention, auditory working memory, and receptive vocabulary, which will be used to quantify the extent to which individual factors contribute to the observed changes in speech recognition and comprehension. Together, the findings from this study will provide additional insight as to the factors that underlie individual susceptibility to the detrimental effects of background noise and reverberation.