The Effects of Speech Intelligibility on Work Performance in Chinese Open-Plan Offices: A Laboratory Study

The language used in an environment is a significant factor when examining the effects of speech intelligibility on work performance and acoustic comfort in open-plan offices. A laboratory experiment has been carried out in this paper to study the effects of speech noise and STI values in a Chinese open-plan office environment. Four cognitive tasks were tested in the experiment, and the objective performance and subject perceptions of 38 participants were examined under 5 different acoustic conditions. The results demonstrate the significant negative effects of speech noise on participants' objective performance of serial recall task and subjective feelings about workplace (including perceived performance, work load, sound disturbance and acoustic comfort), and all these negative effects become stronger with the increase of STI. In addition, participants' subjective perceptions are found to be more sensitive to the change of acoustic condition than their objective performance. Moreover, a comparison of these results and those of previous studies in non-Chinese environments shows there are some differences in the effects of speech noise and STI between Chinese and non-Chinese environments and therefore demonstrates again the importance of taking into consideration of language environment in the analysis of open-plan office acoustic problems.