A dive into Dr Hadley’s talk “Communication behaviour of older adults during face-to-face conversations”
In this webinar, with attendees from all over the world, Dr Hadley shared her advances in conversation research. In particular, Dr Hadley addressed the behaviours that people show when struggling in a conversation, the meaning of those behaviours, and the cognitive mechanisms that may underlie them.
Conversation and behaviour: strategies for when communication gets challenging
“Understanding what makes a conversation challenging depends on how we define a successful conversation,” explained Dr Hadley. What are the factors that define a successful conversation? In a recent study from Dr Hadley’s lab (Nicoras et al., 2023), older adults with and without a hearing loss were asked to identify what factors are important to make a conversation successful. Seven factors were identified. The three most important factors were the following:
1. Being able to listen easily
2. Being spoken to in a helpful way
3. Being engaged and accepted
In other words, in terms of listening experience, what was particularly relevant for older people was to feel engaged in the conversation without having to strain to hear. A challenging conversation can occur when any of the factors of success are not fulfilled, for example, in the presence of a noisy environment or a listener limitation (e.g., hearing loss).
Previous studies have identified that people with normal hearing can use different strategies to help themselves or their conversation partner when the conversation is challenging.
Speech-based strategies
- Talk louder1
- Talk more slowly with more pauses2,3
- Provide simpler information
- Listener can ask for clarification
Movement-based strategies
- Listener can turn the head away from the talker to optimise audibility4
- Listener can move closer to the talker
Other strategies
- Use visual cues (e.g., non-verbal gestures5, lip reading6)
Strategies that can be used when the conversation is challenging. 1Zollinger & Brumm, 2011; 2Smiljanic and Bradlow, 2009; 3Hazan & Pettinato, 2014; 4Grange et al., 2018; 5Munhall et al., 2004; 6Grant and Seitz, 2000
However, these strategies were predominantly reported in studies where the talker and the listener were studied in isolation. “How do these behaviours occur and interact in real face-to-face communication?” wondered Dr Hadley while proceeding to present her studies on conversation behaviour (Hadley et al., 2019, 2021). In these studies, Dr Hadley asked older adults to hold a conversation while sitting in groups of two or three people in the lab and while wearing a head-movement crown and eye trackers. The background noise level was systematically adjusted to see the effect of noise on people's behaviour. Dr Hadley found that as the noise level increased, people used a variety of coping strategies, but only to a small extent and not enough to fully compensate for the additional challenge.
Effects of hearing loss
Dr Hadley explained that people with a hearing loss have often been found to either withdraw from a conversation (Jaworski & Stephens, 1998) or to dominate the conversation (reducing the need to listen; Sørensen et al., 2020). Additionally, turn-taking is less smooth and more variable when the conversational partners have a hearing loss (Petersen et al., 2022).
In an ongoing study, Dr Hadley and colleagues have been evaluating the behaviour and dynamics of four people having a conversation, where two participants had normal hearing and two participants had a hearing loss. Early analyses indicate that participants with hearing loss speak for less time, move closer to the talkers, and spend more time oriented directly toward the talker - hence, they do not use head orientation optimally.
Conversation and cognition
When having a conversation, people need to listen (see Figure 1, Step 2), comprehend (Figure 1, Step 3), prepare a response, and produce a response (Figure 1, Step 4). Since turn-taking in a conversation (the pause between one person stopping their talking and the next person responding) is very quick, people must be predicting to some extent what the other conversation partner is going to say and when they are going to finish. Dr Hadley wondered, “Is this sort of prediction affected by noise level or hearing loss and can we measure it in a conversation?” Hadley and Culling (2022) found that increasing the noise level led to more variability and uncertainty in predicting a turn in a conversation. Additionally, people with hearing loss report more difficulty catching the start of a conversational turn and were slower to predict the end of sentences, as found in Hadley’s recent eye-tracking study, possibly due to reduced availability of cognitive resources.
Clinical implications
People with hearing loss use some beneficial strategies when facing a challenging conversation, though not to their full potential, and also show some behaviours that may be suboptimal. In particular, they tend to face the current talker rather than using head orientation optimally to improve audibility (“Turn an ear to hear”, Grange et al., 2018).
Key takeaways
Here are some key takeaways from Dr Hadley’s talk:
- When the listening situation gets challenging, people can adopt different strategies to improve their listening experience. However, not all strategies are exploited optimally in face-to-face conversation.
- Hearing loss leads to observable changes in behaviour that others can pick up on and use to better accommodate the person with hearing loss.
- Hearing loss affects not only audibility but also the availability of other beneficial cognitive processes.
References
Grange, J. et al. (2018). Turn an ear to hear: How hearing-impaired listeners can exploit head orientation to enhance their speech intelligibility in noisy social settings. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Auditory and Audiological Research 9 - 16.
Grant, K. W., & Seitz, P. F. (2000). The use of visible speech cues for improving auditory detection of spoken sentences. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 108(3), 1197-1208.
Hadley, L. V., Brimijoin, W. O., & Whitmer, W. M. (2019). Speech, movement, and gaze behaviours during dyadic conversation in noise. Scientific reports, 9(1), 1-8.
Hadley, L. V., Whitmer, W. M., Brimijoin, W. O., & Naylor, G. (2021). Conversation in small groups: Speaking and listening strategies depend on the complexities of the environment and group. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 28(2), 632-640.
Hadley, L. V., & Culling, J. F. (2022). Timing of head turns to upcoming talkers in triadic conversation: Evidence for prediction of turn ends and interruptions. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 1061582.
Hazan, V., & Pettinato, M. (2014). The emergence of rhythmic strategies for clarifying speech: variation of syllable rate and pausing in adults, children and teenagers. In Proceedings of the 10th international seminar on speech production (pp. 178-181).
Jaworski, A., & Stephens, D. (1998). Self‐reports on silence as a face‐saving strategy by people with hearing impairment. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 8(1), 61-80.
Munhall, K. G., Jones, J. A., Callan, D. E., Kuratate, T., & Vatikiotis-Bateson, E. (2004). Visual prosody and speech intelligibility: Head movement improves auditory speech perception. Psychological science, 15(2), 133-137.
Nicoras, R., Gotowiec, S., Hadley, L. V., Smeds, K., & Naylor, G. (2023). Conversation success in one-to-one and group conversation: a group concept mapping study of adults with normal and impaired hearing. International Journal of Audiology, 62(9), 868-876.
Petersen, E. B., MacDonald, E. N., & Josefine Munch Sørensen, A. (2022). The effects of hearing-aid amplification and noise on conversational dynamics between normal-hearing and hearing-impaired talkers. Trends in Hearing, 26, 23312165221103340.
Sørensen, A. J. M., MacDonald, E. N., & Lunner, T. (2020). Timing of turn taking between normal-hearing and hearing impaired interlocutors. Proceedings of the International Symposium on Auditory and Audiological Research, 7(August), 37 - 44.
Smiljanić, R., & Bradlow, A. R. (2009). Speaking and hearing clearly: Talker and listener factors in speaking style changes. Language and linguistics compass, 3(1), 236-264.
Zollinger, S. A., & Brumm, H. (2011). The Lombard effect. Current Biology, 21(16), R614-R615.
