De Snelheid Van de Woordherkenning Als Factor in de Communicatie bij Slechthorendheid

In this article it is assumed that in speech communication not only the pronunciation by the speaker and the sensitivity and the discrimination facility of the ears of the listener are important factors, but equally the speed of processing. A previous study showed that Dutch students studying French needed more time to recognize target phonemes in spoken French sentences than did French native speakers. Based on this result it was hypothesized that the hearing impaired need more time for word recognition than comparable normal hearing subjects. To investigate this hypothesis two tests were developed: 1. A list of cvc combinations, consisting of words and non-words is presented to the subject who has to press a button as soon as he hears an existing word. 2. A series of sentences, where target words are presented in highly constraining, normally constraining and not constraining contexts. The subject has to press the response button as soon as he hears a visually presented. Recognition times for the different items measured in a group of 55 hard of hearing subjects were related to the "normal values" obtained in a group of 16 normal hearing young subjects. The tests gave a clear indication that recognition time is a significant personal measure. Besides, a correlation was found between the increase of the recognition time and hearing loss, but not between recognition time and age. It was clear that hard of hearing people needed more time for word recogni-tion and that the use of a hearing aid reduced this time interval. The measure in which the pressure for a fast reaction caused an increase in errors appeared to correlate significantly with the way subjects experienced their handicap, more than with the hearing loss and the discrimination loss as such.