A study led by Northeastern University professor Jonathan Peelle with researchers from across the globe has confirmed that people’s ability to detect background sounds varies from person to person, and is influenced by the noise that came before the sounds.
Peelle’s large-scale replication of a 10-year-old study involved 25 labs across 10 countries and included 149 participants. The findings will be published in the scientific journal Royal Society Open Science.
About a decade ago, a research paper suggested that some people are better at picking out background sounds than others, and that this ability depends on the surrounding noise. But the study’s findings were based on data from just five participants, each completing a five-hour task.
Peelle, a professor of communication sciences and disorders at Northeastern, wanted to see if he could expand this study and understand how listeners understand speech in noise.
“This was a fundamental part of hearing and how we perceive the world,” said Peelle, who studies how people understand speech in noise. “The fact that people’s perception is affected by that was really intriguing and tied into a whole bunch of other ideas about how we hear and understand speech.”
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Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University
