Clear versus casual consonant identification by hearing-impaired and normal-hearing listeners.

This study examined the intelligibility of 21 amplified, casually- and clearly-spoken, US English coda consonants in nonsense syllables for 10 normal-hearing (NH) and 17 HI listeners. Most clear-speech consonants yielded higher recognition scores as expected. However, certain phonological processes common in casual speech, such as palatalization of higher frequency alveolar into lower frequency postalveolar consonants, generated significantly higher scores than their clear counterparts for some HI listeners in noise. These results have implications for coaching conversational partners of aided HI listeners. For the military, talkers can be instructed how to speak to Service members with hearing loss or in noisy environments. PMID: 31801385 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Tags: Clin Linguist Phon Source Type: research