Communicating Effectively with Hard of Hearing People

Introduction

The purpose of today's talk is to discuss how we communicate with one another how hearing loss affects our abilities to communicate effectively, what can be done to compensate for the loss of communication abilities when hearing loss strikes, what we want those who communicate with us to do to help make communication more effective, and what we need to do to help those who communicate with us.

How We Communicate:

• We communicate ideas
• Ideas are communicated in language
• Language = sentences
• Sentences = words
• Words = sounds (vowels and consonants)

We get caught up in being able to understand the words; but effective communication means understanding the ideas. We need to remember that communicating ideas comes from an overall understanding.

We understand:

• The words
• The sentences
• The situational clues
• The gestures and non-verbal clues
• The predicted and expected clues

How hearing loss affects communication

Hearing Loss affects how the ear picks up sound. However, in the aging population, hearing loss does affect changes in how the information we hear is "processed" by the brain and there are changes in the brain's abilities to process even the best received messages.

Hearing loss affects the sounds which can affect the words. But, hearing loss can not affect the language, situational clues, non-verbal clues, prediction clues, and expectation clues. However, we often forget these and focus on the distorted sound.

Compensating for this loss

We think that the solution to the problem of communication is to get better sound. But, this could be limited. We can compensate for poor hearing in a number of ways. Only one small way is to use a hearing aid.

Other non-auditory cues:

• Using the distorted sounds to make sense of words learned through training
• Sentences = language cues
• There am also situational clues
• Gestures and non-verbal clues (include speechreading)
• Predicted and expected clues

What speakers need to do

In order to get these extra cues, we need extra time and some extra help from our speakers. It would be great if speakers would do the following:

• Not distort what they say (accents, facial factors, smoking, eating)
• Speak to us to get the best signal and visual clues (speechreading and non-verbal visuals and situations, etc.)
• Speak slower with breaks in their speech to give us time to do all the extra processing. Rephrase what we don't understand
• Give specific cue words when we miss conversation, then continue with the conversation
• Have a better hearing spouse/friend help us
• Give non-verbal clues - help us focus
• Be patient with us

What the hard of hearing person needs to do

We need to help the speaker understand our needs and limitations

• We need to ask for the extra help
• Become assertive in a kind, positive manner
• We need to ask a spouse/friend to help us
• Learn and practice listening, speechreading, focusing, concentrating
• Learn to restate, paraphrase, validate what we think we heard
• Be patient with others - they don't always understand us
• Have a sense of humor - blame yourself - it often breaks the tension!

Suggested Reading:

Coping with Hearing Loss and Hearing Aids
by Debra A. Shimon, MS, CCC-A
Published by Singular Publishing Group, Inc. - San Diego, CA 92105