Effects of background speech on reading performance in adults

Among the various factors that determine the working environment, noise is often rated as stressful by many employees. It is known that cognitive performance can be affected by background noise, even at moderate sound pressure levels. As reading is an essential requirement at work, a proofreading task was developed and applied to investigate effects of noise. The procedure was designed as a computer-based task for adult workers with normal reading ability. The participants had to find and mark mistakes in written sentences, under time pressure. In a pilot study, 12 participants worked on this task twice, once in a silence condition and once during the presentation of background speech at a moderate sound pressure level. With respect to the two different experimental conditions, it was found that there were significantly more correctly finished items and less reported effort in the silence condition than in the speech sound condition. The results indicate that the new procedure may have the potential to se...