CHOOSING TALKERS FOR THE BKB A SPEECHREADING TEST - A PROCEDURE WITH OBSERVATIONS ON TALKER AGE AND GENDER/

A procedure is described for choosing talkers for the BKB/A (BKB/Austr alian version) Speechreading Test. The main aims were: to select sever al talkers from a pool of potential talkers, to avoid adventitiously c hoosing a markedly atypical single talker; to assess speechreading as a general skill rather than as talker-specific; and to select talkers who were acceptable to speechreaders, relatively easy to speechread, a nd comparable in their speechreadability. Because of the number of var iables involved and the demanding nature of the task for speechreaders , a three-stage selection procedure was adopted. In the resulting BKB/ A 21-sentence list Speechreading Test, four of the 16 sentences in a l ist are each spoken by four talkers, chosen as follows. In Stage 1, 16 talkers (four of each age/gender set: older men, older women, younger men, younger women) were selected from an original pool of 40 (10 of each set), via rankings made by eight hearing-impaired judges with spe echreading experience. In Stage 2, the final four talkers (one of each set) were selected from the 16 via the speechreading scores of furthe r hearing-impaired subjects with speechreading experience. In Stage 3, the order of talker appearance within lists (in random order versus o ver blocks of four consecutive sentences) was determined. This three-s tage approach to talker selection identified differences between talke r candidates within sets, except for younger men, and suggested that, overall, younger women were the easiest to speechread. The discussion addresses the merits and disadvantages of this approach to talker sele ction, and suggests some reasons for the documented differences in spe echreadability among talkers of different age and gender.