A research program is being conducted to quantify the effects of communication clarity (speech intelligibility) on task performance. Two studies have been completed to date. In each study, military crew performance was measured at varied levels of speech intelligibility. Crews performed navigation and gunnery tasks in simulators. In general, task performance decreased as intelligibility decreased. This decrement was more pronounced when the task being performed was complex. On the basis of data collected from these studies, a model has been developed to describe the influence of communication workload on performance. The model's parameters are task difficulty and speech intelligibility.
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