I hate answering the telephone. I will watch it ring and ring from the corner of my eye, paralyzed by fear and unable to look away. When it eventually stops, I feel both ashamed of myself and triumphant that I avoided the trauma of a human conversation. For me personally, the circumstances surrounding a phone call aren’t even that bad. The conversation will be in English, my first language, and the subject matter will be relatively predictable. It’s either a doctor’s office calling to remind me of an appointment or a university alumni center asking for donations, which both use routine scripts that don’t require extra attention. Even under ideal listening conditions, the phone blurs or omits various frequencies that make the caller’s voice difficult to understand – for example, making it difficult to distinguish words like “fight” from “sight.” In person, I could read lips or use visual input like gestures to help me figure out meaning. On the phone, my ears are on their own.

For the 59% of the world’s population who speak more than one language, the anxiety they feel when answering the phone is not just tangible, but scientifically justified. Indeed, many bilingual people report that understanding speech in their second language, on the telephone remains the hardest communicative task they encounter – even after decades of bilingualism. Indiana University takes a cross-disciplinary approach to understanding this and other problems related to impoverished speech signals. From a purely acoustics perspective, talking on the phone is difficult for bilinguals because the signal is missing crucial information that they use to tell the difference between certain sounds. The Linguistics Department at IU has a rich tradition of producing and publishing second language research to understand differences in the way bilinguals and monolinguals categorize speech sounds. In the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, the Speech Research Laboratory examines how other types of distorted and diminished speech signals (e.g. through cochlear implants) affect how much of speech is understood.

Other laboratories here at IU examine the cognitive and experiential factors that give listeners certain advantages for understanding speech in difficult conditions, like on the telephone. Even when listening to the same talker in the same environment, some people understand more than others. In the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, various laboratories are examining the roles of cognitive traits such as selective attention (the ability to ignore the television when someone is talking) and working memory to explain why. All of these laboratories are focused on answering similar big-picture questions: What makes someone a good listener under difficult conditions?  Are these traits primarily biological, psychosocial, or the result of personal experience? And, lastly, what can we do to improve speech intelligibility for bilinguals and people with issues such as hearing loss or attention problems?  

These investigations will contribute important information to our understanding of how people understand speech under difficult listening conditions. Understanding how speech communication breaks down while talking on the phone, on public transportation or in a noisy restaurant remains an ongoing, cross-disciplinary, collaborative effort. As it stands now…straight to voicemail.

Edited by Briana K. Whitaker and Rachel Skipper