Hearing in a social context: Cognitive mechanisms of context use in communication

Conversation is fundamental for developing social attachments, and if the ability to converse with others breaks down, it can be devastating. Not only does conversation with others improve psychological wellbeing, it also buffers people against the ill-effects of stress and other health issues. People with hearing impairment report social isolation and loneliness as some of its most disabling outcomes, yet we know very little about how to support conversation for people that struggle. To date, most research examining listening behaviour in people with hearing loss has tested individuals using experimental tasks that strip away many of the processes involved in real conversation, such as the ability to use contextual information to make inferences, and the requirement to respond to what was said. In the first stage of my fellowship, I focused on conversation-relevant cognitive processing by investigating whether and how people with hearing impairment predict what a talker will say next, and how this affects turn taking timing. I demonstrated that people with hearing impairment show delayed prediction during speech listening (in spite of high intelligibility), and also found their turn taking (for predictable spoken stimuli) to be delayed compared to age-matched normal-hearing controls. This previously unacknowledged impact of hearing loss could compound audibility issues to make social interaction even harder. The next stage of my fellowship broadens my research to encompass alternative ways that listeners use contextual information to ease conversational speech listening. I will continue to investigate prediction (i.e., thinking ahead), and will additionally examine postdiction (i.e., retrospectively figuring out words that were missed), to develop a conceptual model of context use in adverse listening conditions. Through a series of behavioural and eye-tracking studies, I will manipulate confidence in perception and listening effort to assess their effects on prediction and postdiction individually, as well as on the relative prioritisation of these different ways of using context. A concurrent strand of applied research will investigate ways to support context use via acoustic manipulations, ultimately informing the development of hearing devices designed to benefit listening in conversation situations. This will involve assessing of the value of such manipulations for older adults with hearing loss listening to speech in conversation-type situations, and will culminate in a proof-of-concept study applying such manipulations in real time. It is only by investigating listening in a social context that we can understand relevant cognitive processes as they occur in conversation. This fellowship will culminate in a comprehensive understanding of context use in challenging conversation situations, and provide the foundation to allow better support for listeners with hearing impairment. I will continue to build on my relationships with hearing device companies to investigate the commercial relevance of my findings, and hope to ultimately transform the state-of-the-art in hearing devices to benefit the psychological wellbeing of millions.