Multilevel Modeling of Gaze From Listeners With Hearing Loss Following a Realistic Conversation

• Published in: Journal of speech, language, and hearing research language, and hearing research, 2023-11, Vol.66 (11), p.4575-4589
• Main Authors: Shiell, Martha M, Høy-Christensen, Jeppe, Skoglund, Martin A, Keidser, Gitte, Zaar, Johannes, Rotger-Griful, Sergi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Acoustic Stimulation - methods; Aged; Deafness; Hearing Loss; Humans; Speech; Speech Perception
• ISSN: 1092-4388; 1558-9102; 1558-9102
• DOI: 10.1044/2023_JSLHR-22-00641

There is a need for tools to study real-world communication abilities in people with hearing loss. We outline a potential method for this that analyzes gaze and use it to answer the question of when and how much listeners with hearing loss look toward a new talker in a conversation. Twenty-two older adults with hearing loss followed a prerecorded two-person audiovisual conversation in the presence of babble noise. We compared their eye-gaze direction to the conversation in two multilevel logistic regression (MLR) analyses. First, we split the conversation into events classified by the number of active talkers within a turn or a transition, and we tested if these predicted the listener's gaze. Second, we mapped the odds that a listener gazed toward a new talker over time during a conversation transition. We found no evidence that our conversation events predicted changes in the listener's gaze, but the listener's gaze toward the new talker during a silence-transition was predicted by time: The odds of looking at the new talker increased in an s-shaped curve from at least 0.4 s before to 1 s after the onset of the new talker's speech. A comparison of models with different random effects indicated that more variance was explained by differences between individual conversation events than by differences between individual listeners. MLR modeling of eye-gaze during talker transitions is a promising approach to study a listener's perception of realistic conversation. Our experience provides insight to guide future research with this method.