Effects of Sex and Educational Level on the Recognition of Persian Stop and Fricative Consonants in Babble Noise

The ability to communicate verbally with others is important and has an impact on maintaining quality of life. Disturbance in speech perception in the presence of noise is a common complaint to specialists of all ages. Central auditory processing and cognitive ability are effective in speech recognition in noise. Previous studies showed that gender and education have an impact on cognitive and processing skills. Therefore, the present study examined the effect of gender and educational level on the ability to recognize the Persian stop and fricative consonants in the presence of babble noise.
The present observational and cross-sectional study was performed on 31 males and 29 females with normal hearing (31 with diploma, 21 with bachelor, and 8 with higher than bachelor educational level), aged 30-49 years, selected from available samples. After auditory and speech evaluations, recognition of stop and fricative consonants in the form of consonant-vowel-consonant syllable and in the presence of noise in signal-to-noise ratios of 0, -5, and -10 were compared.
Comparison of two age groups revealed that the recognition score of fricative consonants was significant in signal-to-noise ratios of 0, -5, and -10 (p= 0.003). Also, there was a significant difference between the two age groups in terms of the recognition score of fricative consonants in the presence of some vowels in signal-to-noise ratios of 0, -5, and -10 (p= 0.001).
The present study showed that gender and educational level have no effect on the ability to recognize speech in the presence of babble noise; however, noise exposure reduced the recognition score of stop and fricative consonants in the presence of babble noise.