Speaker
Description
Social interactions require interpreting intentions and mental states, often conveyed via speech prosody. This study investigated the impact of sensorineural hearing loss and hearing aids on the perception of paralinguistic prosody conveying intentions. The performance and the confidence of adults with typical hearing and of experienced hearing aid users were evaluated in two classification tasks: 1) distinguishing between sincerity, sarcasm, teasing, or telling a white lie in audio and audio-video recordings of short dyadic exchanges, and 2) distinguishing whether audio recordings of grammatical questions convey genuine questions or indirect requests. Hearing aid users were tested unaided and aided. In both tasks, linear mixed-effects modeling revealed that hearing loss decreased confidence, and that hearing aid use increased it. By contrast, hearing loss did not decrease classification performance, at least not when accounting for age. Hearing aids improved performance only when participants distinguished between sincerity, sarcasm, teasing, and white lies. Visual cues benefited both performance and confidence, and the benefit on confidence was strongest for participants with hearing loss unaided. These findings suggest that changes in confidence should be viewed as an important challenge of hearing loss and should be considered in rehabilitation strategies.