Eline Borch Petersen
Senior Scientist, Denmark
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How can we use conversational dynamics to understand social interaction?
The challenge
Moving beyond speech intelligibility to interaction quality
Effective communication is more than recognizing words—it involves turn-taking, engagement, and having a good conversational flow.
Traditional hearing-aid evaluations focus on speech intelligibility, but real-world conversations require precise timing, vocal effort, and cognitive processing to ensure a smooth interaction with your conversation partner(s).
Improvement of communication
Hearing aids influence on conversational dynamics
Hearing impairment disrupts communications by making it harder to anticipate turn endings, adjust speech levels, and cause people to engage different conversation strategies, particularly in noisy environments or group conversations.
As a result, conversations may become more effortful, less fluid, and more dominated by certain speakers when one or more suffers from impaired hearing.
To improve communication support, we need to assess how hearing impairment and hearing aids influence conversational dynamics, beyond speech intelligibility and word recognition, and ensure that hearing aids support natural interaction.
Our approach
Investigating conversational behavior in different contexts
We conducted multiple studies analyzing how hearing impairment, noise, and hearing-aid use shape real-world conversations. Our research included:
- One-on-one conversations using structured spot-the-difference tasks (DiapixDK) to assess turn-taking timing and adaptation strategies.
- Three-person (triadic) conversations to examine how hearing-impaired (HI) individuals engage and maintain participation in group settings.
- Group conversations evaluate the perceived realism and conversation success.
- Realistic conversational scenarios – creating and testing various methods to spark conversations in laboratory settings, ensuring they reflected natural social interactions.
By integrating natural conversations into a controlled experimental design, we examined speech levels, turn-taking timing, speaking time distribution, and perceived communication success to understand how individuals adapt their communication strategies to different challenges.
Conversational dynamics reveal how we connect - understanding them helps us measure social interaction
Key insights
Understanding how conversations adapt to hearing loss
Unaided HI individuals take longer to initiate turns and show more variability in timing, suggesting difficulty in predicting when to speak.
Normal-hearing (NH) partners compensate for the impaired hearing experienced by the conversation partner by raising their voice, even more so than the HI talkers themselves.
Hearing aid use normalized speech levels and improves turn-taking precision, making conversational exchanges smoother and improving the conversational flow.
However, background noise increases cognitive effort for all speakers, leading to longer response times, louder speech, and reduced conversational flow.
Our findings reinforce that conversations are affected not only be speech clarity (speech level), but also on how people respond, emphasizing the need for hearing-aid evaluations that incorporate conversational dynamics as key measures.
Looking ahead Future research focus
Expanding the study of conversational dynamics
Future research should focus on:
- Developing new outcome measures that assess turn-taking, engagement, and listening effort beyond traditional speech tests.
- Investigating non-verbal communication cues, such as gaze direction and body movement, to better understand how individuals navigate complex conversations.
- Exploring adaptive hearing-aid features that dynamically adjust to real-time conversational needs and user behavior.
- Refining ecologically valid testing environments, integrating natural noise, group discussions, and real-world social interactions.
Real-world impact
Enhancing communication through better hearing technology
Moving beyond speech intelligibility tests to conversation-based assessments allows us to better understand and support real-world communication challenges.
- Better hearing-aid optimization, ensuring devices enhance not only speech clarity but natural and effortless conversation flow.
- More effective audiological counseling, helping users develop strategies to navigate challenging listening environments.
- Stronger social participation, enabling hearing-impaired individuals to engage more confidently in one-on-one and group discussions without additional cognitive strain.
By focusing on how people interact, not just how they hear, we move toward hearing solutions that truly support effortless and meaningful communication.
Related Publications
Explore how our research advances the understanding of conversational dynamics
Researchers involved
Research area Foster social interaction
Partners Universities