It Takes Two to Tango
Do Your Part:
- Get his/her attention before starting to speak. If you don’t, they will miss the first few words of your sentence, often resulting in the need to repeat it.
- Slow down. Pausing between phrases gives the hearing aid user time to consider the context and the topic of the conversation.
- Focus on your diction. It may not be as good as you think.
- Consider the environment in which you want to be understood. Background noises tend to interfere with reception of the soft and subtle sounds in our language, especially the consonants: t, s, p, b, f, m, n, th, ch, d, c, b, h, k, l, q, etc.
- Turn the TV/radio down first.
- Wait till the truck passes by before speaking again.
- Move to a quieter area.
- Talking very loudly or shouting does not guarantee that you are understood. Hearing the consonants makes word recognition possible. High-frequency hearing loss reduces the inability to hear those quiet consonants. You can shout vowels but not most consonants, so more volume only increases the sound of vowels without improving word recognition
- Don’t expect the new hearing aids to make their hearing completely normal. You may still have to repeat from to time to time. And there will be some sounds that you can hear but which are not heard by the hearing aid user.
- It is common for those with chronic hearing loss to respond with “huh” or “what” as an automatic response, even if they are hearing and understanding you with hearing aids.
- Let them see your face. To some degree, everyone lip reads. Hard-of-hearing people rely on such “facial cues” to make up for what they cannot hear, even if they use hearing aids.