Office of Aerospace Medicine Technical Reports

FAA Office of Aerospace Medicine
Civil Aerospace Medical Institute


Report No: DOT/FAA/AM-76/3

Title and Subtitle: Massed versus distributed practice in learned improvement of speech intelligibility

Report Date: March 1976

Authors: Tobias, JV

Abstract: Student pilots or new air traffic controllers have two ways to learn to understand the noisy and distorted communications common to aircraft operations: they may learn as they are working on other aspects of the activity, or they may learn by devoting a continuous period of time to speech-intelligibility improvement. Work completed at this laboratory indicates that two listening sessions of less than 1 hour each can accomplish the improvement and, under some circumstances, a single session will do. The current experiments are intended to reveal some of the microstructure of this learning process.

Key Words: Communication, Learning, Noise, Speech, Speech Reception

No. of Pages: 9

Last updated: Friday, June 1, 2012