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PubMed · 2518840

Hearing conservation: implementing and evaluating a program.

R K Harrison
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Abstract

1. More than eight million workers in the United States are affected by some noise-induced hearing loss. Noise pollution is a significant health hazard in the workplace today. 2. Occupational health nurses are in a key position to make tremendous contributions to the effectiveness of a hearing conservation program. 3. Cooperative efforts between management and labor are needed to prevent noise-induced hearing loss. 4. A hearing conservation program is an effective instrument for preventing noise-induced occupational hearing loss, complying with governmental regulation, and controlling a company's compensation cost.

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AudiometryEar Protective DevicesEnvironmental MonitoringHearing Loss, Noise-InducedHumansOccupational DiseasesOccupational Health NursingJournal Article

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R K Harrison. 1989. Hearing conservation: implementing and evaluating a program.. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2518840/

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PubMed1992

Normal-hearing and hearing-impaired subjects' ability to just follow conversation in competing speech, reversed speech, and noise backgrounds.

The performance on a conversation-following task by 24 hearing-impaired persons was compared with that of 24 matched controls with normal hearing in the presence of three background noises: (a) speech-spectrum random noise, (b) a male voice, and (c) the male voice played in reverse. The subjects' task was to readjust the sound level of a female voice (signal), every time the signal voice was attenuated, to the subjective level at which it was just possible to understand what was being said. To assess the benefit of lipreading, half of the material was presented audiovisually and half auditorily only. It was predicted that background speech would have a greater masking effect than reversed speech, which would in turn have a lesser masking effect than random noise. It was predicted that hearing-impaired subjects would perform more poorly than the normal-hearing controls in a background of speech. The influence of lipreading was expected to be constant across groups and conditions. The results showed that the hearing-impaired subjects were equally affected by the three background noises and that normal-hearing persons were less affected by the background speech than by noise. The performance of the normal-hearing persons was superior to that of the hearing-impaired subjects. The prediction about lipreading was confirmed. The results were explained in terms of the reduced temporal resolution by the hearing-impaired subjects.

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