Voice Perception in Job Interviews
Do you interview or hire people as part of your job? Participants in this online survey will listen to potential "applicants" and indicate their first impressions of their personalities and hire-ability.
In this study, employment managers imagined that audio clips of young adults reading randomized sentences were job applicants. They gave their first impressions of the speakers' personalities and suitability for jobs in their industry. What they didn't know is that some of the speakers were born deaf and had received cochlear implants (CIs) as children. CIs help them hear and speak, but they don't hear a perfect representation of speech, including from their own voices. After years of speech therapy, some have very good speech and hearing, while others struggle, and everything in between. But even those who achieve highly-intelligible speech can sound a little different, like having an accent.
We know from work in many fields that listeners have biases about how people talk and that they attribute stereotypical personality traits based on accents. For example, when people hear a Southern accent, they (consciously or not) think the speaker sounds uneducated, but also friendly (so it's not all bad!). People think some accents sound sophisticated, some tough, some cool, some incompetent, and so on. What about a "deaf" accent? And what if you don't know that's what you're hearing?
This study is part of a larger project about Impressions of Cochlear Implant User Speech that has found that listeners' first impressions of CI users are less positive than those of people with typical hearing (TH), and it's worse for CI users who are harder to understand. The listeners don't know they're hearing CI users, and they have little experience with hearing loss, so they're not purposefully discriminating -- they just react to hearing a person with an unusual "accent." But if those first impressions make employers think the speakers seem less intelligent or competent, they could negatively impact deaf applicants' job prospects -- and managers could benefit from more information about deafness, cochlear implants, and the abilities of people with hearing loss.
Student Corner
Students
- Zoe Haddad
Data and Materials
- See the main project page (Impressions of CI User Speech) for details about audio clips, speaker intelligibility scores, etc.
- Personality and "hire-ability" ratings from 70 employment managers in reaction to eight CI and four TH young adult speakers
- Employer/industry info, attitudes-toward-deafness responses; calculations relating these to subjective ratings
- Materials in Qualtrics: listening/rating procedure with randomization blocks, attitude questionnaire, consent, demographics, etc.
- Speaker and judge demographics, hearing/device history, experience with hearing loss
Project Ideas
- Create educational materials for employers about deafness, cochlear implants, discrimination, speech and abilities of people wth hearing loss, accommodations that can help deaf people be successful in the workplace.
- Run a similar experiment with other listeners, e.g., kids/teens, people who have a lot of personal experience with deafness, people who work in speech/hearing therapy, health care, education, disability.