Effect of sentential context on syllabic stress perception by hearing-impaired listeners

Although carrier phrases are extensively used in clinical testing of speech recognition, their influence on target identification by hearing-impaired (HI) listeners is poorly understood. The present study examined the effect of sentential context on the identification of the stressed syllable within the target VCV by listeners with mild to severe hearing loss. The study focused on the influence of prosodic structure of the carrier sentence as determined by the location of sentential stress and speaking rate. The target VCV’s were presented in contexts that varied in the amount of the prosodic information available about the sentential stress pattern and speaking rate. That is, the target VCV’s were presented embedded either in a sentence, in a noise simulation of the sentence, or extracted from the sentence and presented in isolation. Results indicated that both the prosodic context and the presentation condition affected performance. When sentential stress was on the target VCV, performance accuracy was highest. The finding is linked to the acoustic salience of the stressed syllable. The effect of the presentation condition is discussed in terms of the hearing-impaired listeners’ possible difficulties in segmenting the sentence and allocating attention.