Do your Eyes Help you Hear? Appropriate Visual Contexts Improve Performance in Speech in Noise Task

Ash, Gillian M. (2020) Do your Eyes Help you Hear? Appropriate Visual Contexts Improve Performance in Speech in Noise Task. Memorial University of Newfoundland. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

Previous hearing and auditory perceptual research as focused mainly on the older population as well as those within the hard of hearing community but little on the population of young adults. Further, previous research had suggested a positive role on semantic context when processing degraded speech. The current study explored the potential benefits of using a multimodal (ie. audiovisual) stimulus in a speech-in-noise (SIN) task under conditions with and without semantic context. A total of 51 normal hearing young adults participated in this study (Mage = 19.67, SD= 1.45), one Genderfluid, 35 females (Mage= 19.49, SD=1.31) and 15 males (Mage= 20.13, SD=1.73). Results suggested that SIN tasks completed with audiovisual stimuli led to a higher number of correct\ target words than the standard audio only SIN task. Further, SIN task conditions which included both a visual talker and both visual and semantic context led to a significant positive impact on performance compared to both the audiovisual (no context) and audio alone SIN conditions. This suggested that visual and contextual aids were beneficial speech recognition under less than ideal conditions. Future research should examine similar audiovisual and contextual SIN tasks on hard of hearing participants or those with cochlear implants to determine if these visual and contextual aids are beneficial to these populations.

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