Sørensen A Josefine Munch, Lunner Thomas, MacDonald Ewen N
Hearing Systems Group, Department of Health Technology, Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark.
Eriksholm Research Centre, Oticon A/S, Snekkersten, Denmark.
Trends Hear. 2024 Jan-Dec;28:23312165241296073. doi: 10.1177/23312165241296073.
This study investigated the effects of noise and hearing impairment on conversational dynamics between pairs of young normal-hearing and older hearing-impaired interlocutors. Twelve pairs of normal-hearing and hearing-impaired individuals completed a spot-the-difference task in quiet and in three levels of multitalker babble. To achieve the rapid response timing of turn taking that has been observed in normal conversations, people must simultaneously comprehend incoming speech, plan a response, and predict when their partners will end their turn. In difficult conditions, we hypothesized that the timing of turn taking by both normal-hearing and hearing-impaired interlocutors would be delayed and more variable. We found that the timing of turn starts by talkers with hearing impairment had higher variability than those with normal hearing, and participants with both normal hearing and hearing impairment started turns later and with more variability in the presence of noise. Overall, in the presence of noise, talkers spoke louder and slower, increased the duration of their pauses but decreased their rate of occurrence, and produced longer interpausal units, that is, units of connected speech surrounded by silence. However, when compared to previous studies of conversations between normal-hearing partners, the pattern of changes in conversational behavior by the normal-hearing participants was very different in the most challenging noise condition. The extent to which these adaptations are made to reduce the difficulty experienced by their partner with hearing impairment vs. the difficulty they experience themselves is not clear.
本研究调查了噪音和听力障碍对年轻听力正常者与年长听力受损者之间对话动态的影响。十二对听力正常者和听力受损者在安静环境以及三种多说话者嘈杂程度水平下完成了找不同任务。为了实现正常对话中观察到的快速轮流回应时机，人们必须同时理解传入的语音、计划回应，并预测其伙伴何时结束发言。在困难条件下，我们假设听力正常者和听力受损者的轮流回应时机都会延迟且更具变异性。我们发现，听力受损的交谈者的轮流起始时机比听力正常者的变异性更高，并且听力正常和听力受损的参与者在有噪音的情况下开始发言的时间更晚且变异性更大。总体而言，在有噪音的情况下，交谈者说话声音更大、语速更慢，停顿时间增加但停顿频率降低，并且产生的停顿间单元更长，即由沉默包围的连贯语音单元。然而，与之前关于听力正常伙伴之间对话的研究相比，在最具挑战性的噪音条件下，听力正常参与者的对话行为变化模式非常不同。这些调整在多大程度上是为了减轻其听力受损伙伴所经历的困难，以及在多大程度上是为了减轻他们自己所经历的困难，尚不清楚。
