Discriminación auditiva en entornos de ruido, en personas que usan auriculares de forma habitual || Perception of phonemes in noise environments, in people who usually use headphones

Abstract

This work aimed to know how the daily and prolonged use of headphones as well as background noise affect speech understanding. There is evidence in the literature showing that the habitual use of headphones can lead to hearing loss at the frequency of 3000 Hz. In addition, it is well known that a high level of ambient noise makes comprehension difficult.. Telemarketers, a little studied group, are exposed to both effects. So, we selected 24 telemarketers as our experimental group, and 20 people outwith that profession as a control group.  For the evaluation task, we used a Spanish reduced version of the Speech Perception in Noise Test. The task consisted in repeating the last word of a series of pre-recorded phrases with different background sounds, in which there were different phonemes and different predictability of the final words. The results showed that the habitual use of headphones has a negative effect on the auditory perception of certain frequencies, and that call centers noise affects negatively speech comprehension even more than traffic. These findings are applicable both to work and education, and prove the importance of making people aware of the appropriate use of headphones.