The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of hearing loss and
adverse listening conditions on the conversational patterns of seniors. A
second goal was to determine what measures best describe these conversational
patterns. Results were compared to those of a case study of a hard-of-hearing
senior presented by Pichora-Fuller & Johnson (submitted).
One normal-hearing and one hearing-impaired senior were selected for this
study. Each subject participated in two conversations, one in an advantageous
condition and one in an adverse, noisy listening condition. Participants were
interviewed about their ability to understand the conversations. Further
measures of comprehension included free and recognition recall tasks, a
conversational fluency rating, and a detailed discourse analysis based on a
transcript of the conversations.
Of all the comprehension measures used, the recognition task appeared to be
the most sensitive indicator of perceptual difficulty and comprehension of
conversational detail. Free recall results were a good measure of relative
memory for detail and gist across the different signal-to-noise ratio
conditions. Results of the discourse analysis provided quantitative evidence
that was able to support or contradict the comprehension difficulties indicated
on the conversational fluency ratings. The discourse analysis procedure was
too time-intensive to be- a viable clinical tool.' However, some aspects of the
analysis, including production of new content, overt repair requests, and
subtopic management, could be singled out as particularly helpful in
identifying comprehension problems, indicating that a more selective analysis
may suffice for clinical purposes.
No marked differences in comprehension between the hearing-impaired and
normal-hearing senior were observed for the conversations in advantageous
listening conditions. In the adverse listening conditions, the normal-hearing
participant reported greater effort, but his comprehension did not appear to
be significantly affected.
Results were consistent with the Pichora-Fuller & Johnson (submitted) study
in that both hard-of-hearing seniors showed reduced comprehension of the
conversations in adverse listening conditions on all of the comprehension
measures. However, individual variables appeared to have a significant effect
on conversational behaviour. In particular, the subject of the Pichora-Fuller
& Johnson (submitted) study tended to conceal her hearing problems by feigning
understanding, while the hearing-impaired senior of the present study appeared
to initiate repairs whenever they were needed. It was evident from the results
presented here that individual baseline information is essential to the
assessment of conversational behaviour and comprehension difficulties. / Medicine, Faculty of / Audiology and Speech Sciences, School of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/6033 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Roodenburg, Kristin E. J. |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Format | 5653840 bytes, application/pdf |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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