Rating Deaf Speakers’ Comprehensibility

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the utility of a measure of communication efficacy, one that explicitly encompasses features of both speech and language. Toward this end the construct of comprehensibility, which has been used in the field of second-language acquisition, was adapted. Comprehensibility, operationally defined as the extent to which a listener understands utterances produced by a speaker in a communication context, was studied in relation to various dimensions of communication efficacy. Four observers evaluated the comprehensibility of utterances produced by 41 deaf young adults, using a nine-point rating scale. The reliability of the comprehensibility ratings was determined, and the ratings were studied in relation to independent assessments of the subjects’ speech intelligibility, English language proficiency, speech recognition, reading comprehension, and hearing loss. The results of this investigation indicate that comprehensibility can be evaluated reliably and that comprehensibility is associated with both speech intelligibility and language proficiency. The implications of these findings for the clinical assessment of speech and language are discussed.