The intelligibility of clear speech at normal and slow rates for older hearing‐impaired listeners.

Abstract

Sentences spoken “clearly” are significantly more intelligible than those spoken “conversationally” for normal‐hearing and hearing‐impaired listeners in a variety of listening environments [e.g., Payton et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 95, 1581–1592 (1994)]. Typically, clear speech is also spoken more slowly than conversational speech [Picheny et al., J. Speech Hear. Res. 29, 434–446 (1986); Uchanski et al., ibid. 39, 494–509 (1996)]. However, talkers can produce a form of clear speech at normal rates that provides a large intelligibility advantage to young normal‐hearing listeners in noise [Krause and Braida, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 112, 2165–2172 (2002)]. To determine whether this form of clear speech provides a similar benefit to older hearing‐impaired (OHI) listeners, this experiment examined the intelligibility of conversational and clear speech at normal and slow rates (conv/normal, clear/normal, conv/slow, and clear/slow) for 11 OHI listeners with symmetric, sloping, moderate SNHL. Although clear speech at normal rates provided only a very small benefit on average, large benefits (comparable to clear/slow speech) were obtained in certain talker/listener combinations. For two of the four talkers, the intelligibility advantage was consistent across listener, suggesting that the benefit of clear speech at normal rates for this population may be talker‐dependent.