Communication abilities and effort in a noisy telephone communication task: Tools and first data
* Presenting author
Abstract:
For assessing the benefit of hearing devices during communication in an ecologically valid way, reliable tools must be developed beyond speech recognition that measure communicative abilities in daily life - even without leaving home during the pandemic. We therefore designed a communication task via telephone using background noise while eliciting a natural conversation between two talkers (Diapix Task) using their own private telephones at home. Participants were requested to find the differences between two images in a conversation, without seeing the other participants’ image during a period of 3 minutes.After each trial, the subjective effort for listening to their interlocutor and for speaking themselves is rated. Additionally, their interlocutor’s effort in speaking is estimated. The conversations between the interlocutors were recorded to perform a content-based and acoustic analysis to measure the respective performance. The trials were performed in quiet and with background noise of a restaurant, which was presented at 50, 60, 70 and 80 dB(A) using an asterisk server-based telephone system that also provided the background noise via telephone.First data obtained with normal hearing listeners will be presented and discussed with respect to ecological validity of the test, reliability, and ways to reduce the evaluation workload.