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Besides the embarrassment of hearing only portions of a sentence, many other factors cause varying degrees of perceived psychological impairment and dysfunction. These are expressed by a feeling of being “slow to catch on” or “hearing but not understanding.” These factors produce a social withdrawal syndrome shown by remarks such as, “I don’t think I want to go there anymore.” The hearing-impaired person begins to avoid certain situations and certain people because “they mumble.” All of these issues cause a drop out from social functions as well as disturbed relationships.
A discussion and explanation of why these factors occur may be helpful. Hearing loss first causes a person to miss certain soft sounds. These are mostly consonants. The vowels sounds, such as “a,” “e,” “i,” “o,” and “u,” are more distinct and stronger. The hearing loss causes letters to “fall out” of the words or sentences. When a letter falls out of a word, a syllable is blurred or a word seems garbled.
To demonstrate this for yourself, take a sentence and mark out three or four consonant letters. Now try to read the sentence. If the key word is involved, the sentence will not make sense. Many words are still there, but the meaning is gone. This causes a feeling of inadequacy and ineptitude. The common remark of almost all people with hearing loss is “I hear, but I don’t understand.”
People think, “Why didn’t I understand? Everyone else heard and understood. It must be that my mind is not functioning well.” The fact is they’ve only heard part of the sentence and that makes them feel quite inadequate.
Also, to reinforce the feeling of inadequacy, they “catch on late.” This gives them the feeling of being mentally “slow.” Let us explain.
Two things help the person who is trying to make sense of a conversation. First, if something has been said before, the content of thought is available for certain cues. Second, by watching the face, facial expression and lip movement help tremendously. There are many letters easily seen and differentiated when visualized, such as the difference between “P” and “B.” This then becomes a process of mentally solving the puzzle by lip reading and association with content of thought in the conversation. This process actually helps keep one mentally sharp, and most people become quite skillful at what we call “speech reading.”
In order to work the puzzle of lip movement and previous thought processes, it does take time, and it is often a thought process without many cues. Frequently one may even need to wait for the next sentence. So when you do catch on late, please don’t condemn yourself. Pat yourself on the back and say, “If I weren’t so smart, I wouldn’t have understood that!” You see, you are using the talent of speech reading that people with normal hearing have not acquired. This talent will continue to help you the rest of your life.
Unfortunately, in a crowd or a noisy place the two skills used in speech reading (watching faces and observing the content of thought) are not possible to use. One cannot watch that many faces and put that many ideas together with thoughts. The result is you feel inadequate and even lost. You feel like escaping, and you say, “I don’t think I’ll go there anymore!” Or you think, “There’s going to be a crowd there. I think I’ll just stay home.”
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