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

Although carrier phrases are extensively used in the clinical testing of speech recognition, their influence on target identification by hearing-impaired listeners is poorly understood. This study examined the effect of sentential context on the identification of the stressed syllable within the target VCV (vowel-consonant vowel set) by listeners with mild-to-severe hearing loss. The study focused on the influence of the prosodic structure of the carrier sentence as determined by the location of sentential stress and speaking rate. The target VCVs 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 VCVs were presented either embedded 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 the sentential stress was on the target VCV, the performance accuracy was highest. This 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 in allocating attention