Adults with a severe-to-profound hearing impairment. investigating the effects of linguistic context on speech perception

Linguistic context is known to influence speech perception abilities in adults with normal hearing. Recent reports question the importance of context for adults with a severe-to-profound hearing impairment. The severe reduction and distortion in acoustic input may result in the listener perceiving insufficient acoustic-phonetic cues to allow access to higher level linguistic processing. To investigate this further, a detailed study of the speech recognition of adults with a severe-to-profound hearing impairment (N=34) was undertaken. A series of aided speech recognition tasks, sequentially examined the different levels of processing in the speech perception chain. The investigation concluded that the effects of severe-to-profound hearing impairment did not reduce the listener’s ability to take advantage of contextual cues. There was, however, wide variability between participants in the utilisation of contextual processing. This indicates that to estimate “real-life” speech perception skills, an evaluation of contextual processing ability is required.