ANNOYANCE PERCEPTION OF SOUND AND INFORMATION EXTRACTION

The judgment of annoyance of distorted speech differs radically for di fferent language groups. The results show that those who do comprehend a spoken language, base their annoyance judgments on the informationa l content extracted while those who do not base it on the perceptual c haracteristics of meaningless sound (particularly loudness). A series of distorted German speech sounds were presented to two subject groups consisting of native Swedish and English speakers, and the results we re compared with earlier results from groups of native German and Poli sh subjects. The 50 stimuli were generated from the very same speech s ignal distorted in two principle ways, either with repeated silent gap s or superimposed noise impulses. The perceived annoyance of the disto rted speech was judged both by category scaling for all subject groups , and as a control for ''ceiling'' effects, also by magnitude estimati on for the Swedish and the English subjects. There is a pronounced ten dency for German subjects to judge the German speech distorted with si lent gaps as more annoying than that distorted with superimposed noise impulses. In contrast, the Swedish, English, and Polish subjects judg ed the two German-speech distortions in reversed order with regard to annoyance. Thus for noncomprehending listeners, noise-distorted speech is more annoying but for comprehending listeners it is speech distort ed by gaps. This means that impaired communication intrusiveness rathe r than loudness predominates in annoyance judgments from comprehending listeners.