What is it about?
Speaking clearly is often recommended to help people with hearing loss understand conversations. It typically involves speaking more slowly, pronouncing words carefully, and pausing more frequently. However, these changes may make speech sound less natural. Our study compared everyday speech, untrained clear speech, and clear speech following a 30-minute training session. Twenty-eight listeners rated recordings from 12 speakers for naturalness. We found that everyday speech sounded the most natural, while trained clear speech sounded the least natural. Slower speaking rates and increased pausing were associated with reduced naturalness. These findings highlight the importance of balancing clarity with naturalness when teaching communication strategies to people with hearing loss and their communication partners.
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Why is it important?
Although clear speech is widely recommended to improve communication for people with hearing loss, little is known about how natural it sounds. Our study is among the first to examine this question. We found that even brief clear speech training made speech sound significantly less natural, particularly when speakers slowed down excessively. These findings highlight the need for training approaches that balance speech clarity with naturalness, potentially improving everyday communication for people with hearing loss and their communication partners.
Perspectives
This work is particularly meaningful to me because it highlights the importance of aural rehabilitation in improving communication for people with hearing loss. It also grew out of a rewarding collaboration with a colleague whose expertise in fluency disorders brought a fresh perspective to my research on clear speech. By approaching the topic from two different areas of expertise, we identified an important but largely overlooked question about clear speech--its naturalness. I hope our findings encourage further research into communication strategies that are not only effective but also natural and comfortable to use in everyday life.
Polina Shuminsky
Hofstra University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Perceived Naturalness and Acoustic Characteristics of Habitual Versus Clear Speech for Individuals With Hearing Loss, Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, September 2026, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA),
DOI: 10.1044/2026_jslhr-25-00691.
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