Speech perception in a communicative context: An investigation using question answer pairs

By diminishing the role of communicative context, traditional tests of spee ch perception may underestimate or misrepresent the actual speech perceptio n abilities of adults with a hearing impairment. This study investigates th is contention by devising an assessment that may better simulate some aspec ts of "real-life" speech perception. A group of 31 participants with a seve re-to-profound hearing impairment took part in a series of speech perceptio n tests while wearing their hearing aids. The tests used question/answer or adjacency pairs, where the stimulus sentence was preceded by a question sp oken by the participant. Four conditions were included: (a) where there was no initiating sentence, as in a traditional open-set speech perception tes t; (b) where the initiating question was neutral (e.g. "Why?"); (c) where t here was a disruptive semantic relationship between the question and answer ; and (d) where there was a strong contextual relationship between the ques tion and answer. The time delay between the question and answer was also va ried. Results demonstrated that in all conditions where there was a precedi ng question speech perception improved, and increasing the cohesion between the question and the reply improves speech perception scores. Additionally , time delay and the relatedness of the reply interacted. The effects of se mantic context appeared to diminish over a 10-s period while of her linguis tic effects remained more constant. These results indicate the utility of s imulating communicative environments within speech perception tests.