The relation between intelligibility of irrelevant speech and cognitive performance: a revised model

What the study found

Performance declines became more likely as irrelevant speech became more intelligible; verbal short-term memory was especially sensitive.

Limitations

Threshold behavior varies by task and study design; STI is only one descriptor of acoustic distraction.

Neurodesign interpretation

This is one of the cleanest bridges from an acoustic engineering metric to a cognitive mechanism.

Possible design implications

Use partitions, absorption, masking and distance to reduce intelligibility in focus areas.

Why it stays in the corpus

Retain for translating speech privacy metrics into cognitive implications.

Study design

Synthesis of 34 tests

Population

Participants across 14 studies

Setting

Laboratory and office-like settings

Field

Acoustics

Mechanism

Speech intelligibility, working-memory interference

Spatial variable

Speech Transmission Index, background speech

Keywords

STI, speech intelligibility, working memory, office