Contact with students with hearing impairments and the evaluation of speech intelligibility and personal qualities

This study examined the effect of contact with mainstreamed high school students with hearing impairments on hearing students' evaluations of personal qualities of speakers with three different levels of speech intelligibility (SI) and on their attitudes toward deafness (ATD). Seventy high school students who studied with classmates with hearing impairments (group with contact) and 70 students who did not study with classmates with hearing impairments (group without contact) listened to recordings of three speakers with good, moderate, and poor SI and evaluated the speakers' personal qualities using a semantic differential scale that included emotional-behavioral and cognitive factors. In addition, the participants evaluated the speakers' SI and filled out a questionnaire regarding their ATD. In general, better SI was associated with the attribution of more positive personal qualities. However, students with contact expressed more positive evaluations (than the students without contact) of the speaker with the poor SI on both the emotional-behavioral and the cognitive factors of the personal qualities questionnaire. These evaluations were similar to evaluations of the speaker with moderate SI. Students without contact expressed more positive evaluations of the speaker with the moderate SI on the cognitive factor than did students with contact. Finally, a positive relation was found between ATD and evaluation of personal qualities of the speaker with the poor SI on the cognitive and emotional-behavioral factors.