Speech understanding is difficult to assess in real-world communication. However, instances where interlocutors ask for repetitions, clarifications, or express difficulty hearing, can provide insights into the ongoing speech understanding. From conversations recorded from 25 groups of triads consisting of two normal-hearing (NH) and one hearing-impaired (HI) interlocutor, we identified and analyzed all miscommunication events to evaluate the effects of hearing impairment, background noise, and hearing-aid signal processing.

A subset of miscommunications are so-called other-initiated repairs (OIRs) where one interlocutor signals a communication breakdown, which is then jointly resolved by conversation partners. Verbal OIRs can vary in specificity, from the unspecific open requests (e.g. ‘What?’) to the very specific restricted offers (e.g. ‘Did you say blue?’). We hypothesize that in difficult communication situations, talkers will use open OIRs to a larger extent, as poorer speech understanding prohibits the formulation of more specific OIRs.

The results showed that interlocutors have more miscommunications when they suffer from impaired hearing, however increasing the level of background noise results in more miscommunications for all interlocutors. Open request OIRs were generally used more often than restricted and even more so in difficult communication situations. For the HI interlocutor, hearing-aid signal processing reduces the number of miscommunications and proportion of open OIRs used. Interestingly, the directional hearing-aid setting, which was experienced by the HI interlocutor at the high noise level, affected the number and type of OIRs produced by the NH conversation partners. To offer a potential explanation between the sound experienced by the HI interlocutor and the miscommunications made by the NH conversation partners, an analysis of the relation between miscommunications and conversational speech level will be presented.