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From: spr@cs.brown.edu (Loretta Reiss)
Newsgroups: misc.handicap
Subject: Re: HI-HOH Speech
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Date: 5 Mar 90 22:14:03 GMT
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Reply-To: spr@cs.brown.edu (Loretta Reiss)
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Index Number: 7067

My personal impression of how late-deafened people regulate the volume of
their voices is a little different.  I suspect that the problem is not that
people do not know how loud their voices are, but that they do not know
how much ambient noise is in the room.	Some computer workstations with
fans inside create a 50 dB background, for example.  A hearing person
working in an office with one of these adjusts his voice unconsciously to
speak over it.	Another office might look the same, but be a lot quieter.
As people trying to build computer speech recognizers  have noted, we are
hardly aware of a lot of background noise and manage to ignore it and speak
differently to be understood by other persons in a noisy room.	My impression
is that my late-deafened friends speak appropriately given what they know
about the environment.	It is not that they do not have control of the loudness
of their voices, but that they need to know that they are standing next to a
noisy machine or that the room is very quiet and everyone is whispering or
that the car has a broken muffler.

--Loretta Reiss