The Impact Of Acoustic Environment On English Scientific And Technical Literature Reading In Chinese Open-Plan Research Offices

The phrase "open plan offices" covers offices and similar space where a large number of people can work,communicate,or concentrate independently in well-defined workstations.Open plan offices are widely used because of its flexible layout,convenient communication among employees,and low economic.However,acoustic problems,such as noise and disturbance to occupants,have aroused the attention of scholars,and studies have been conducted to the acoustic problems.Open plan research office,a special type of open office,is commonly seen in colleges and universities,where postgraduates deal with their daily work,such as literature reading,profession development and experiment operation.Researches have been conducted to study acoustic environment in open plan research offices,but the number of the cases still remain small.In order to understand the situation of acoustic environment in open plan research offices and people's demand for acoustic environment,this paper first conducted a field study on acoustic environment in open plan research offices.Taking12 open plan research offices in Xiamen Campus of Huaqiao University as an example,objective measurements and subjective evaluation on acoustic environment were conducted.Meanwhile,the results of the field study in open plan research offices were compared with that of general open plan offices.The values of L_A,eq and L₁₀ in open plan research offices were 46.7 dB?A?and 47.0 dB?A?,respectively,which were significantly lower than that of general open plan officees,whose values were 51.9 dB?A?and 54.2 dB?A?.As for subjective evaluation,the values of noise disturbance and acoustic satisfaction in open plan research offices were 3.94 and 3.97,respectively,while the values in general open plan offices were 3.42 and 4.42,respectively.Occupants in open plan research offices are more easily disturbed by noise and dissatisfied with acoustic environment,though noise level in open plan research offices are lower than general open plan offices.It is supposed that people in open plan research offices are much more sensitive to noise disturbance and that require much quieter indoor environment.Speech,especially intelligible speech,is the main noise resource in open plan offices which influences occupants'work productivity.The more intelligible the speech is,the greater the disturbance is.In order to further study the impact of acoustic environment on the work of the staff in open plan research offices,based on masking effect and Chinese speech as noise,a laboratory study was carried out to explore the influence of acoustic environment on English scientific and technical literature reading in Chinese open-plan offices.20 post graduate students took part in the experiment from school of architecture in Huaqiao Universtiy,and performed in five different acoustic environment,whose values of STI were 0.08,0.16,0.23,0.34,0.78,respectively.Results showed significant impact of different speech intelligibility on English scientific and technical literature reading.The accuracy of tests of the literature and reading performance decreased with the increase of speech intelligibility.Work load,disturbance and tiredness enhanced and the subjective evaluation on acoustic environment decreased during literature reading when speech intelligibility arised.Compared with general cognitive tasks,STI has a greater impact on objective performance of English literature reading.Under the same acoustic environment,English literature reading is much more easily disturbed by speech,and occupants'subjective evaluation on acoustic environment is also lower.Therefore English literature reading is more easily disturbed by high STI and has higher requirements on acoustic environment in open-plan offices.Reducing speech intelligibility in open-plan research offices has positive impact on improving staff's performance.