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2010
Conference Paper
Titel
The influence of speech intelligibility on performance and acoustic comfort in offices
Abstract
Noise, particularly speech, is amongst the most often mentioned sources of disturbance in open-plan offices (e.g. Banbury & Berry, 2005). In addition to that intelligible speech is known to impair cognitive performance (e.g. Schlittmeier et al., 2008). The Speech Transmission Index (STI) is assumed to be a predictor of how much performance is reduced due to speech of varying intelligibility (e.g. Hongisto, 2005). An experiment explores the interrelation between the STI, cognitive performance and acoustic comfort. Twelve sound scenarios with different STI values (0.24 to 0.81) were presented to subjects conducting performance tests and acoustic judgments. Results prove that there is a strong connection between these measures. Therefore the STI can be considered as a suitable physical set value for the acoustic design of open-plan offices.