Effects of Added Emphasis and Pause in Audio Delivery of Health Information
This addresses health literacy by optimizing audio information delivery for the general public, but it is incremental as it builds on existing audio enhancement research.
The study investigated how adding emphasis and pauses in audio delivery of health information affects comprehension and retention, finding that emphasis improves comprehension (54% vs 50% for difficult texts) and lowers perceived difficulty, while pauses can improve retention but may harm comprehension.
Health literacy is crucial to supporting good health and is a major national goal. Audio delivery of information is becoming more popular for informing oneself. In this study, we evaluate the effect of audio enhancements in the form of information emphasis and pauses with health texts of varying difficulty and we measure health information comprehension and retention. We produced audio snippets from difficult and easy text and conducted the study on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). Our findings suggest that emphasis matters for both information comprehension and retention. When there is no added pause, emphasizing significant information can lower the perceived difficulty for difficult and easy texts. Comprehension is higher (54%) with correctly placed emphasis for the difficult texts compared to not adding emphasis (50%). Adding a pause lowers perceived difficulty and can improve retention but adversely affects information comprehension.