  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.
