Editorial Keep Your Friends Close and Your Spouse Closer DOI: 10.3766/jaaa.24.8.1

ll of us have, at one time or another, had an encounter with a patient who says something completely unintelligible. We stand there staring, for what seems like an eternity, while processing all of the various combinations of statements the individual could have made given the context. In many cases, before we can ask the patient to please repeat himself or herself, the spouse, sensing our confusion, interjects and repeats what the patient was trying to communicate. The patient nods his or her head, and we continue on with the appointment. I have often wondered, in these instances, how the spouse understood but I did not. What I heard was very different from what the spouse repeated. There is research demonstrating that spouses do, in fact, understand each other better than they understand strangers. In controlled environments, researchers have demonstrated that talker familiarity can significantly improve speech recognition. One way this has been accomplished is through training listeners by having them listen to a voice for a period of time and then measure improvement in understanding (Pisoni, 1981). However, this is time-consuming, and only small increases in performance are accomplished using this technique. Using a spouse as the familiar voice is a clever way to get around this issue. Spouses’ voices are the perfect

A

stimulus to use when comparing performance between familiar and unfamiliar utterances. But one of the lingering questions has been this: Does the relationship between familiar voices and speech recognition performance hold in the presence of hearing loss? In this month’s issue of JAAA, authors Souza, Gehani, Wright, and McCloy measured the benefits of long-term talker familiarity for older individuals with hearing impairment using two experiments. First, the investigators evaluated hearing impaired participants’ speech recognition with both unfamiliar and familiar voices with different levels of background noise. The second experiment measured speech performance using a familiar voice in the presence of other speech. The investigators present robust findings that can help explain the common experience related above. Devin L. McCaslin Deputy Editor-in-Chief

REFERENCE Pisoni DB. (1981) Some current theoretical issues in speech perception. Cognition 10:249–259

Visit JAAA online at http://www.audiology.org/resources/journal

Copyright of Journal of the American Academy of Audiology is the property of American Academy of Audiology and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.

Keep your friends close and your spouse closer.

Keep your friends close and your spouse closer. - PDF Download Free
50KB Sizes 0 Downloads 0 Views