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Re: Accessible Speech Rate?

for

From: _mallory
Date: May 12, 2016 10:03AM

On Thu, May 12, 2016 at 04:17:31PM +0200, Karen Mardahl wrote:
> Hi Marc,
>
> From anecdotal experience, you should also talk with people who have
> hearing loss.
>
> I learned that even a very articulate speaker is bad news for a person
> with, say, 30% hearing loss, if they are a rapid-fire speaker. The listener
> with hearing loss has a hard time distinguishing the individual words and
> the words become garbled. I attended such a presentation once and I
> commented on how the speaker's voice carried nicely throughout the room and
> how articulate she was. A friend with hearing loss said she had to work
> hard to comprehend what was being said because the speaking delivery was
> too fast for her to decipher properly. When you work hard just to grasp
> what is being said, your cognitive experience decreases.
>
> I have never heard of research on this, but anecdotally, I know it is an
> issue. I think this is an angle worth investigating to find out whether
> there is some research somewhere.
>
> Regards, Karen Mardahl

This reminds me of a conference I went to which had live captioning on a
screen by a steno where the difference was obvious between fast-speaking
speakers and "normal" speed speakers-- it was frequently joked about in
between talks.

_mallory