Influence of road traffic noise peaks on reading task performance and disturbance in a laboratory context

The influence of fluctuating road traffic noise on perceived disturbance during a reading task as well as on performance, inside a living room with closed windows, is presented in this paper. Sixteen 2-min sound sequences were created combining two variables: the number of events (four levels varying from one to four car pass-bys) and the peak emergence above the background noise (four levels with a 5 dB(A) step) keeping limited variations of LAmax, 1s. The noise impact was evaluated through a reading task of texts synchronized with the sound sequences, for participants classified into fast or slow readers, and sensitive or non-sensitive to noise. The comprehension rate of the texts decreases as the background sound level increases. The reading speed decreases during the rising front of a peak, and goes back to its former regular reading speed during the descending front of the peak. This slowdown during the rising front reaches 14% for slow readers. The declared disturbance is higher for slow readers compared to fast readers, and higher for noise sensitive persons compared to non-sensitive persons. The influence of the acoustic indicators on the reading disturbance is very small compared to the influence of personal factors. There is even no influence of the number of events on this disturbance.