Perception And Speech Perception

A comparative study of effect of noise on speech perception score in adults and children with normal hearing.

Introduction:

Hearing and listening are two sides of the same coin. We might hear a variety of sounds but we listen to or perceive only those sound signals that are of our interest. Thus, perception or the process of filtering away the unwanted signal is of importance. Perception, thus, refers to the process by which an individual organizes and interprets sensory data he has received, on the basis of his past experience; it is an act of categorization, according to which stimuli are received, identified, sorted and given individual meaning (Eisenson, 1972).

Speech perception is a specialized aspect of a general human ability, the ability

The concept is analogous to white light. White noise is also called Gaussian or thermal noise. Narrow band noise - NBN is the most preferred noise for masking pure tones in pure tone audiometry as it has the maximum masking efficiency for pure tone audiometry. The bandwidth of the noise at each centre frequency is based on the knowledge of the critical 1000 Hz after which the energy in the noise drops at the rate of 12 dB per octave.In our day to day environment there are various types of noises like community noise, vehicular noise, industrial noise, construction noise, background noise in schools mostly during recess time in all these noise children face huge difficulty in speech perception.

NEED:

In children speech perception ability play significant role for development of speech and language skill, whereas in adult this process is already developed. Therefore it is interesting to see what effect of noise level on speech perception ability occurs in both the groups. Amount of effect it cause on Children who need to undergo noisy situations in daily life and school setup.

Here we wanted to see how much speech perception is affected in normal hearing population with and without presence of noise in adults and