Quantifying Miscommunications in Triadic Conversations: Effects of Hearing Impairment, Hearing Aids, and Background...

Conversations are an important part of our social lives, although for people with hearing impairment (HI), conversations can pose a considerable challenge and can often lead to miscommunications.

In conversations recorded from 25 groups consisting of one HI interlocutor and two normal hearing (NH) interlocutors, all miscommunications were identified to evaluate how HI, background noise level, and hearing-aid signal processing affected miscommunications. A subset of miscommunications is so-called other-initiated repairs (OIRs) where one interlocutor signals a communication breakdown, using unspecific open requests (e.g., "What?") or increasingly more specific restricted requests or offers (e.g., "Who?" or "Did you say blue?"). An "open request" signals a problem without specifying what is misheard/understood, while the restricted request specifies what part of the sentence is not heard, and finally, the most specific "restricted offer" is asking the conversation partner to confirm the supposed word/phrase. With increasing communication difficulty, open OIRs are expected to be more frequently used due to poorer speech understanding.

The results showed that HI interlocutors generally had more miscommunications and that, across interlocutors, open OIRs were mostly used. At low noise levels, the HI interlocutor had fewer miscommunications and used more specific OIRs when wearing a hearing aid relative to being unaided. At the high noise level, all interlocutors had more miscommunications. When listening to directional sound processing (dir) at the high noise level, the HI interlocutor produced fewer open OIRs. It is interesting that the NH interlocutors were also affected by having more miscommunications and more open OIRs when the HI interlocutor listened to dir. The speech levels of the HI interlocutors were reduced in dir, and a relationship was found between the HI speech levels and the number of OIRs made by the NH interlocutors.

Our results highlight how sensitive the number and nature of miscommunications and OIRs in conversations are, not only to the sound environment, but also to the experience of a single (HI) interlocutor, even in triadic interactions, where only two interlocutors are strictly needed to keep the conversation going.