SNR had great impact on the ability of listeners to understand speech in the presence of background noise; however, the type of noise and the type of level-dependent device used did not. The results of the study support the notion that individuals potentially subjected to high-level impulse noise should be able to use level-dependent earplugs in low-level continuous noise without compromising speech understanding. More specifically, the passive, level-dependent earplugs currently used by military personnel do not appear to be detrimental to speech communication for listeners with normal hearing when the speech is at an average conversational level and the listener is actively attending to the signal.
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