Attitudes Toward Deafness Affect Impressions of Young Adults With Cochlear Implants

This study continues a project on speech-based impressions of early-implanted cochlear implant (CI) users. It examined relationships between listeners' attitudes or personal traits and how they judged CI users upon hearing their speech. College students with typical hearing (TH) listened to speech samples from CI users and TH young adults and rated the speakers' personalities and attractiveness as friends. CI users varied in speech intelligibility (proportion of words recognized by transcribers in prior work). Overall, listeners rated TH speakers most positively, CI users with high intelligibility (CI-Hi) as intermediate, and CI users with lower intelligibility (CI-Lo) most negatively. Listeners also completed questionnaires about their personalities, values, and attitudes toward deafness. Listeners with more positive attitudes toward deaf people rated both CI user groups more positively, and listeners whose personality and values questionnaires showed more tolerance and openness to interpersonal differences rated CI-Lo speakers more positively. These patterns underline the social importance of CI users' speech intelligibility while bringing to light the role of listeners' pre-existing attitudes in forming negative first impressions, which could impact CI users' friendships with TH peers. Because listeners' attitudes reflected ignorance about deaf people's abilities, this study calls for increased education about deafness for TH students.