Effects of Added Emphasis and Pause in Audio Delivery of Health Information

TL;DR

This study investigates how audio emphasis and pauses affect health information comprehension and retention, finding emphasis improves understanding, while pauses can lower perceived difficulty but may hinder comprehension.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on the effects of audio emphasis and pauses in health information delivery across texts of varying difficulty.

Findings

Emphasis improves comprehension for difficult texts (54% vs 50%).

Adding pauses reduces perceived difficulty and can enhance retention.

Emphasis without pauses benefits understanding, especially for complex texts.

Abstract

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.