Speech directed at able -bodied adults, disabled adults, and disabled adults with speech impairments

Many researchers have sought to change society's negative attitudes about disabled people to help them integrate into society. That has improved the way people think about disabled persons, but leaves the question whether it has changed how they act toward them. This study examined speech directed at disabled persons. Because disabled people evoke stereotypes of incompetence, it was predicted that able-bodied people would emit child-directed speech at them. One hundred twenty undergraduate college students served as subjects. Subjects first filled out the Contact with Disabled Persons Scale (CDP) and the Attitudes Toward Disabled Persons Scale (ATDP). They then talked to an able-bodied, disabled, or speech and physically disabled man or woman. The speech was audio taped and transcribed. The transcribed speech was put into cloze-procedure form, which was completed by 12 undergraduates, and was characterized in terms of the Flesch Readability Score, the Type-Token ratio, and the number of words. These variables were subjected to analyses of variance. The hypotheses were: (1) speech directed at disabled persons would have simpler vocabulary and more repetitions, and be more understandable than speech directed at able-bodied persons; speech directed at speech-disabled persons would be simpler than speech to both able-bodied and disabled persons; (2) a clarification request by the listeners would cause those speaking to disabled persons to simplify their speech to aid comprehension, but would not affect the speech to able-bodied persons; (3) subjects would use simpler speech when talking to disabled women than to disabled men; (4) gender and disability would have a combined effect so that the simplest speech would be to speech disabled women; (5) the CDP would correlate positively with the complexity of speech; (6) the ATDP would not correlate with the complexity of speech. The hypotheses were generally not supported except for the effect of the clarification request, which affected the speech to all listeners. Results indicated that different modes of increasing understanding were used depending on the confederate's gender. Subjects used one type of compensation, simpler speech, for disabled men, but when talking to disabled women, they used another, more words.