Conversation behaviour in daily life: the effects of situation, hearing loss, and hearing-aid use

People modify their verbal communication behaviour, dependent on the physical and social context, and on the sensory, cognitive and linguistic abilities, they and their communication partners possess. Such phenomena have been the object of extensive laboratory study and theorizing in fields such as socio- and psycho-linguistics, but further theoretical progress is hampered by a lack of hard data on typical patterns of behaviour in daily life and changes with real-life context. There are many possible experimental contrasts one might employ to illuminate these phenomena. In this project, we propose to utilize the presence vs. absence of hearing loss and use vs. non-use of hearing aids. These contrasts enable comparisons across groups without any artificial manipulations confounding participants' natural behaviour.
Anecdotal and qualitative evidence indicates that people with hearing loss change their communication behaviour in various ways; avoiding social situations, partaking in them but not engaging, or engaging but failing to communicate satisfactorily. Such coping strategies will be reflected in conversational behaviour patterns at microscopic (momentary, in conversation) and macroscopic (lifestyle, in social engagement) timescales. They are also likely to be dependent on individual factors such as personality. The key research questions for this project are thus:
- What constitutes 'normal' social interaction in terms of number, duration, and type of conversations? And how does conversation behaviour vary depending on the auditory environment?
- Do people with untreated hearing loss show different patterns of social interaction, and are their coping strategies during conversation adaptive or maladaptive?
- Do people whose hearing loss is treated (via hearing aids) return to more 'normal' patterns of social interaction and conversation behaviour?
We have a unique opportunity to acquire objective data about people's daily-life conversation behaviour, due to a new generation of hearing aids developed by our collaborating partner. These hearing aids collect data on metrics such as how many syllables the wearer has spoken in a given time interval, how many syllables have been spoken by others nearby, what sort of acoustical environment the wearer is in, and the relative levels of speech and background noise. Returning data to the researcher via a smartphone and the cloud, these discreet ear-worn devices constitute privacy-preserving dataloggers of the individual's verbal social activity and auditory ecology.
The devices can be configured to provide standard-of-care amplification for the hearing-impaired or no amplification, so comparable data can be collected for people with and without hearing loss.