Knowledge Bank

Listeners integrate auditory and visual cues in perception of speech when communicating in both normal and compromised listening environments. Three factors affect the success of interaction in communication situations: characteristics of the talker, characteristics of the listener, and characteristics of the speech signal itself. In everyday life, individuals must comprehend speech produced by many different talkers. Little, however, is known about the characteristics of talkers that make them more intelligible and that best facilitate audio- visual integration. In the present study, 10 adult listeners, with normal or corrected-to-normal vision and auditory thresholds at or better than 25 dB HL across all frequencies, were presented with everyday sentences produced by eight different talkers selected from a commercially available software package (HeLPs, Sensimetrics, Inc.). Sentences were presented under audio-only, visual-only, and audio + visual modalities. Talkers varied widely in gender, age, and ethnicity. Auditory input was degraded to approximate a sloping hearing loss (55 dB HL at 1000 Hz). Results showed significant differences across talkers, but no males were more intelligible in auditory-only presentation, whereas females were more intelligible under visual-only and audio+visual presentation. These results provide new insights for the design of oral rehabilitation programs for hearing-impaired persons.