This winter, on my way to the airport to visit my son’s young family in Australia, I met Peter, my taxi driver, a smart and articulate man in his mid-50s. As part of our conversation, I happened to mention to him my blog and I got his attention straight away. Peter is losing his hearing too and he quickly confessed to faking to understand at times what his customers were saying. We laugh as it is something I also do.
I explained to him that one of the big issues we face is the stigma attached to a loss of hearing. He smiled in agreement and remarked that sometimes people who are hard of hearing give the impression that they are thick “They don’t get it as fast as others, do they? he said. “Equally they don’t express themselves clearly”.
That second remark stayed with me and made me wonder why it was. Was there something else I was not entirely conscious of? Does the way we speak become murky and hard for others to understand? Then I recall that when I got my first set of hearing aids, I noticed that my voice sounded different if not weird. I intuitively felt that this might affect my communication but I left that for another day, simply understanding others through these new hearing aids was challenging enough.
After saying goodbye to Peter, I wanted to understand this particular issue better and looked on the internet for an answer. I wrote “Could a loss of hearing affect our speech?” and I got a flood of responses including this interesting page from Allison, an audiologist based in Houston. Here is a link to her page https://allisonaudiology.com/patient-resources/hearing-health/how-does-hearing-loss-affect-your-speech/. To make it easy for you here are a couple of her paragraphs. In particular, I like the way Allison makes a case about the sharpness of letters and also whenever someone tries a higher volume.
Sharpness of letters
Quote,” Vowels are a lot easier to pronounce than consonants. Aa and ee sounds tend to stick out in words, in most accents. They don’t require a lot of mouth movement either. However, consonants need lip, tongue and movement of the jaw to be pronounced correctly. The sharpness of letters is slowly lost and the pitch in which you speak will also lower. This is due to your brain not being able to capture a verbal marker. The vibration in your head made by speaking isn’t registered and thus it’s difficult to know if you’re getting the accuracy of pronunciation correct.
The crispness of your speech will deteriorate as your brain and ears are no longer in communication. You’ll find those gentle consonants such as L, C, R and S will be among the first to lose their impact in your speech.
A higher volume
As you can imagine, when you can no longer decimate whether you are speaking as accurately as you would like, you tend to overcompensate. This will result in a higher volume as you try to hear what you are saying and make sure others around you can understand what you’re trying to convey. If left untreated, hearing loss can also result in the loss of one’s normal tone and accent. People tend to sound the same when they are shouting, and it may result in changes to your mouth’s muscle memory.
Not to mention, people may consider you rude as you’re unintentionally raising your voice at them when trying to have a conversation. The unfortunate social implications often fly under the radar until they affect us personally.” unquote
The case of children
Allison is referring here to adults, so I wondered what happens to children with hearing loss. They do not have the benefit of having heard as we do the complete gamete of sounds. Indeed, children with hearing loss miss out on sounds from day one and that in turn causes problems with their ability to speak, read, and develop social skills. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association reckon that “They do not learn words as fast as those who have normal hearing. They may learn concrete words like cat, jump, five, and red. However, they may have trouble with abstract words like before, equal to, and shy. They may not use words like the, an, are, and a.” and there are many other issues.
What sounds am I missing?
My sympathy goes to these poor kids as their issues are far more complicated than ours. Not being able to express themselves properly, they have reduced opportunities to perceive and understand another person’s emotional state. Something we must also bear in mind, but my main concern right now is that my own ability to hear certain sounds is impacting my ability to reproduce those sounds correctly. But which sounds are they? This is an enigma even if we know about low-frequency and high-frequency sounds, it is hard to put one’s finger on a specific sound we are missing. I enjoy studying languages and know that our brain relies on our ears to adapt to various frequencies and sound patterns. While I think I remember how to make the sounds, I am now struggling to reproduce some of them properly. One way to verify is of course to ask our partner, family, and friends. The issue is that they also get used to us and don’t always pick on those things… still worth asking!
I learned to speak English in my twenties, my mother tongue is French and this is adding a layer of complexity as my neurons have been better trained and calibrated to hear French. For example, it is easier for me to listen to a French radio station than one in English. Except for the early morning news which are delivered too quickly and are exhausting on top of not being all that cheerful. Equally, I used to enjoy listening to the BBC for over 30 years but today I am struggling to understand.
Reverting to the issue of mispronouncing words, it is easy to understand that the degree of hearing loss is likely to influence our ability to speak clearly. So, what can I do if I don’t want this to worsen? How can I mitigate this issue? Fortunately, there is an infinity of advice on the internet and here are my two recommendations. The first thing on my mind is using our common sense and the second is speech therapy.
Using our common sense:
By this I mean I should avoid talking too rapidly or making sentences that are too complex. By slowing down a little, pausing between sentences or phrases, and waiting to make sure I am understood, I feel I should get a more pleasing result and better cooperation.
Speech imitation appears to be one of the most fundamental aspects of human vocal behaviour. It plays an important role in speech development. This is how children learn to speak as they often imitate their parents, and this is how most students learn a foreign language. So as much as possible we should control our own speech delivery while allowing our counterpart to adjust their own style to better suit ours.
This may help in the case of a one-to-one conversation, but it becomes ineffective if three or more of us are gathered. I find I am playing catch-up all the time. To help me cope with this I took part in a 2-hour weekly lipreading class for nearly one year and found it helpful. It certainly raised my awareness and ability to guess-read others, but this is not enough on its own.
You may have noticed that in any conversation there is a lot going on. We adapt to the intonation, we try to adjust our voice for clarity if need be, we change our speech rate and most importantly we notice the body language, by this I mean posture and gestures. If you are interested in this complex behavioural world, I invite you to read this excellent paper on cognitive science available from the website of Frontiers in Psychology. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00280/full
Can a speech therapist help?
I can’t comment much on this as I have not used speech therapy and don’t plan to use it soon but I thought it was worth mentioning it. The beauty of preparing these posts is that I am discovering a wonderful world of people and professionals willing to assist. This is how I came across this team of speech and language therapists. They are based in the Manchester region and provide services for adults throughout the UK. I have not had any direct contact with them, so I am purely relying on the information they publish. Speech and language therapy is a complex area best handled by professionals. They devise a therapy programme tailored to specific needs. https://www.slt.co.uk/conditions/hearing-loss-and-impairment/
The final word is yours.
Now having explained how a simple conversation with my taxi friend got me to think about my speech delivery, I wonder what your experience is. Has your hearing been impacted by your loss of hearing? Do you feel that people are understanding you as well as they used to? I can’t give you any advice sadly, but I believe that by sharing our respective experiences, we can help each other.