Acknowledging the Social Bases of Speech Intelligibility: A Key to Improving Equity in Psychological and Physiological Acoustics

A major endeavor in psychological and physiological (P&P) acoustics is understanding the causes and consequences of hearing loss. One of the most common complaints of individuals with hearing loss is difficulty perceiving speech. Hence, many studies in P&P compare psychophysical or physiological measures of auditory perception with performance on speech perception tasks like sentence intelligibility. Sentence intelligibility tasks often use read speech samples produced by a small number of demographically unspecified talkers, with only limited exceptions (i.e., McCloy, Wright, & Souza, 2015; Wright & Souza, 2012). This talk reviews findings from the author’s and others’ research groups showing that sentence intelligibility varies as a function of talkers’ social identities, including a talker’s actual or perceived racial identity (Babel and Russell, 2015; McGowan, 2015; Tripp, Lyons, and Munson, 2022). These findings reinforce recent calls for P&P to revise the intelligibility measures used to characterize the consequences of hearing loss (i.e., Beechey, 2022a, 2022b). In particular, this talk argues for a collective research program developing entirely new speech intelligibility measures that reflect diverse ways of speaking, and the diverse functions of spoken language. [Work funded by NIH grant R21 DC018070.]