Het programmaboekje met samenvattingen voor 2023 vind je hier.
De plenaire lezing werd gegeven door Annemiek Hammer & Martine Coene (Language and Hearing Center Amsterdam, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam).
Language is a vehicle for participation in community. The ability to receive and produce messages is central to human interaction, from enabling us to communicate about our basic needs to allowing us to share our most complex thoughts and ideas with those around us. As the freedom to express ourselves through language is a fundamental human right, all humans should be able to send and receive communicative messages, regardless of their age or capacity (McLeod 2018).
For individuals who have reduced access to spoken language effective communication may be compromised. It is well known that barriers to communication particularly affect children and elderly adults, individuals who do not speak the dominant language of their community, and people with reduced auditory, visual or communication abilities.
In this talk, we would like to provide an overview of the challenges that individuals with hearing disabilities are facing when accessing spoken communication. Over the years, we have set up various studies providing insights on potential facilitators and barriers to communication experienced by children, adolescents, students, working adults and elderly people with hearing loss.
The common thread connecting these different populations involves an increased adverse effect of noise on speech understanding as compared to hearing peers. Across the lifespan, noise is omnipresent in many aspects of daily life and is known to interfere with oral communication. In addition to acoustic factors, speech understanding is influenced by linguistic features of the target language and by cognitive features of the language users. Regarding linguistic features, our experimental work with children and adults provides evidence that one of the crucial factors determining perceptive accuracy is syntactic complexity. When listeners are confronted with passive sentences or embedded clauses against a background of noise they will produce significantly lower numbers of correct repetitions than when they are asked to repeat simple SVO sentences. In elderly listeners with a hearing loss, the observed ‘syntactic complexity’ effect is even more pronounced and may be linked to age-related declines in inhibitory control. As for children enrolled in primary and high school education and students enrolled in higher education programs, we will present a similar adverse effect of noise on communication performance and overall academic success. We will provide evidence coming from a variety of studies based on different populations of Dutch-speaking children and young students between 3 and 25 years old enrolled in mainstream and special education programs.>
Finally, during this talk we will also address the way in which everyday communication and interactions have been fundamentally reshaped by the social restrictions and safety measures which have been adopted in response to Covid-19 induced social distancing measures and personal protective equipment. We will present the results of the NWO-financed project ‘Erbij Horen’ investigating the way in which these changes have exacerbated communication barriers faced by different populations with hearing loss living in the Netherlands. The results of this project illustrate not only the complex nature of speech understanding in day-to-day conditions but also the importance of equal accessibility to communication in view of the participation of all individuals in society at any age.