LING 214 Introduction to Psycholinguistics Assessment 1 – Critique PDF

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LING214 Introduction to Psycholinguistics: Assessment 1 – Critique Lei, J., Gong, H. & Chen, L. 2019, "Enhanced Speechreading Performance in Young Hearing Aid Users in China", Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research (Online), vol. 62, no. 2, pp. 307-317. https://doi.org/10.1044/2018_JSLHR-S-18-0153 Q1. In paragraph 3 ‘The Perceptual Dependence Hypothesis and Speechreading in HA users’ “It is hypothesized that the superior speechreading skills in persons with HI result from their greater duration or degree of dependence on visual elements of speech for speech Communication” (Lei, Gong, & Chen 2019) Q2. Perceptual dependence Hypothesis is a more specific and adapted hypothesis and it was first mentioned by Pimperton et al (2017) Q3. The authors did not explain why speech reading might enhance speech communication as a result of visual audio integration. They did however sufficiently discuss the literature to identify that there is a lack of studies which have examined the performance of speech reading in hearing aid users and also the limitations of each study that has ultimately lead to mixed results and the need to further investigate. Q4. “The perceptual dependence hypothesis would predict that persons with HI who are HA users will not perform in speechreading tasks in comparison to persons with HI who do not use HAs” (Lei, Gong, & Chen 2019) Tillberg et al. (1996) did not support this hypothesis whereas Walder et al (2001) did support this hypothesis. Q5. Two groups were selected to compare the speech reading performance of hearing aid users against the speech reading performance of those with hearing impairment that don’t use hearing aids. A flaw in the recruitment of participants was that they primarily communicated with each other in sign language and their was a lot of individual variation in the ability of the participants to speak mandarin. Q6. The study used a computer based speech reading test called The Chinese Speechreading test to assess the participants speech reading. It consisted of three subtests a) words, b) phrases and c) sentences. One hundred and forty five students participated in the study and watched a silent video clip of a male talker saying 12 target words, then 12 target phrases and 12 target sentences and for each one selected a picture from four options that they thought matched the word, phrase or sentence being said. The linguistic knowledge being measured was the ability of the participants to speech read and correctly interpret the word, phrase or sentence being said and match

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it with an image. The dependant variables were the mean accuracy rates and the response time that it took for the participant to interpret and identify the word, phrase or sentence said by the man in the silent video. Q7. In order to make sure the pictures used were not ambiguous the authors asked four teachers and 10 younger students from the same school to rate the pictures on a five point scale (5 being the least possible ambiguity). The pictures that scored under 4 were drawn until they scored above 4. A pilot study was also implemented with 16 hearing impaired students to ensure that the words, phrases and sentences would be familiar to hearing impaired participants. Q8. A flaw of this research design is that they encouraged participants to respond as quickly as possible which may compromise their accuracy in responding. Q9. The results do not support the first hypothesis as participants with hearing aids had much better accuracy results as opposed to those without hearing aids Q10. The results also do not support the second hypothesis as participants who had more years of hearing aid use had higher speechreading accuracy results as opposed to the hypothesised idea that the longer an individual relied on visual elements of speech the higher their speech reading accuracy would be. Q11. The results for the hearing aid participants were numerically slower, although not statistically significant than the non hearing aid participants. There may have been a correlation between the fact that hearing aid participants had slower response times in order to obtain higher accuracy scores. Q12. They demonstrated the results through the use of three graphs and explained that the results did not support the perceptual dependence hypothesis Q13. Apparently in chinese culture, it is considered impolite to look directly at a person's face during conversation and therefore people generally avoid focusing on the visual speech information and more so on the auditory information. Also chinese is a tonal language and the meaning tone can change the meaning of a word, even if the pronunciation of the word is otherwise the same. Q14. The difference between words and phrases that seemed inconsistent with other studies is the idea that phrases in their study may be less complex than the single words. This is because monosyllabic words can be more ambiguous than disyllabic

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words or phrases. The words comprised less semantic information which created less opportunities for analysis as opposed to the phrases in chinese. Q15. The authors explained the difficulty in reading the sentence subsets by explaining that it may have been due to more combinations of alternate words that need to be processed as opposed to words and phrases and the fact that it has previously been found that individuals with hearing impairment find it harder to master the grammatical rules in chinese. In addition speech reading sentences demands greater working memory and it has been suggested that individuals with hearing impairment have limited working memory capacity which would also create difficulty with speech reading sentences. Q16. The recruitment of participants could be improved. It may have been a more reliable study if the study was done with speakers of a different language until further research is done on whether chinese speakers rely on auditory information more than speakers of other languages. Q17. In general, the abstract provides an accurate description of the assessments used but they should have included information about the response time results.

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Reference list

Lei, J., Gong, H. & Chen, L. 2019, "Enhanced Speechreading Performance in Young Hearing Aid Users in China", Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research (Online), vol. 62, no. 2, pp. 307-317. https://doi.org/10.1044/2018_JSLHR-S-18-0153

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