Response bias in the perception of deaf speech by experienced and naive listeners

A comparative study of the attempts of naive listeners and listeners familiar with deaf speech to identify utterances of young deaf speakers showed that there were no differences between the intelligibility scores of the two groups. Significant differences emerged, however, in the type of errors made by each group, the naive listeners making more errors of omission and the listeners familiar with deaf speech more substitution errors. It is suggested that these results indicate different response biases towards the evaluation task, but fail to support the hypothesis that familiarity with the speaker confers a substantial advantage in understanding the speech of the deaf, in the absence of other clues.