The Effect of Experience on Listener's Judgment about Speech Intelligibility of Hearing Impaired Children

this research was designed to study the effect of listeners’ experience on their judgment about speech intelligibility of hearing impaired (HI) children.

Twenty-six 4 to 7 years HI children were selected with readily available sampling from a rehabilitation center in Karaj, Iran. Conversation speech sample of each child was recorded digitally. Four listeners group (mother, naive, less experienced and experienced) listened to these recordings. Listeners had to express whatever understood. Their sayings matched to children speech and children speech intelligibility calculated. Data were analyzed with repeated measures method.

Analysis showed that judgment of four listener groups about speech intelligibility of HI children was significantly different. Paired comparison of speech intelligibility means showed that only judgment of naive and less experienced listeners were not significantly different.

In clinical setting, evaluation of HI speech intelligibility relates to familiarization of listener with this type of speech.