Noise is one of the leading environmental factors that affect the onset of physical or mental illness and reduce the quality of life of a population. It is also a major public health problem, as exposure to excessive noise levels leads to damage to the hearing system, cognitive impairment, sleep disorders, irritability, and a variety of other problems that negatively affect human well-being and health. Exposure to noise affects the entire human function, both the mental sphere and the autonomic nervous system and endocrine system. Employees in the transport industries, industry and production are mostly exposed to the noise, however it also affects employees in the service industries such as: education, healthcare, catering, etc. Due to the development and expansion of transport and industry, it is almost impossible to avoid noise, but we can partially protect ourselves from its harmful effects, therefore raising awareness of the negative effects of noise on health and the introduction of noise protection guidelines is essential. Noise also has a significant impact on speech and communication, as it significantly reduces the speaker’s ability of auditory speech control, and also reduces the intelligibility of the message. The speaker invests more effort into noise-induced communication to maintain auditory control and intelligibility of speech, so he modifies his speech acoustically and temporally, which can encourage the occurrence of damage to the vocal cords, and in addition, modified speech affects the listener's understanding of the message, which reduces communication performance. The master's thesis compared prosodic elements of speech (speech loudness, articulation and speech rate, accent, intonation and voice pitch) of fourteen readers while reading five texts in seven different acoustic situations (in silence, under the influence of road and speech noise at 60 dB level, influenced by road and voice noise at 80 dB level and influenced by road and voice noise at 80 dB played with the loudspeaker). In addition, it was tested which type and noise level were most disturbing to the readers. The readers were recorded while reading texts, and audio readings were then processed and analysed in the Praat (program for phonetic analysis of speech). The type and level of the noise have been found to influence the loudness of the speech, since the loudness of the speech increases with the increase of the noise level. The type of read text had no effect on the speech loudness changes. Speech and articulation rate varied significantly depending on the type of text being read, however the acoustic situation had no significant effect on speech rate. Readers were reading literary texts more slowly, with the lowest speech and articulation rate achieved while reading a poem. Noise and text type did not have a significant effect on altering average laryngeal tone in all readers, but changes were observed in each individual reader. The tone of the word under the influence of noise changed especially in less commonly used words, the most frequent changes occurring during the first introduction of a higher noise level. The sentence intonation varied in individual sentences in relation to the surrounding sentences and the whole text, even here changes were most frequent during the first reading under the influence of a certain level of noise. According to the readers, both reading and listening were the most disturbed by speech noise at 80 dB level, mainly due to the information-masking effect. Findings regarding the change of prosodic elements of speech under the influence of noise have shown that noise is an important factor that negatively affects the speaker's ability to control his own speech, but its influence varies between speakers individually. Awareness of the negative effects of noise on speech and the individual's adaptation of speech in noisy situations is important, since speakers who are daily exposed to communication in a noisy environment can maintain the effectiveness of communication with their interlocutors and reduce the possibility of damage to the speech organs due to loud speech in noisy conditions.
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