Hearing Where One Can Not Hear
As a deaf person with both ears unable to interpret sounds below around 105 decibels, I have to depend on hearing aids in order to partly hear some sounds. Those devices do not make me a hearing person, as it only “improve” my hearing loss to moderate deafness. Much better than profound deafness, but still far below what people would assume to be normal hearing.
As an aside, cochlear implants are also limited in this manner, only improving the sense of hearing to a certain extent. Far better than hearing aids, but not up to normal hearing levels.
To compensate for the limitation, the digital hearing aids I have are designed to be optimized toward the vocal range of sounds, making those sounds as prominent as they usually are, and minimizing the sounds in the background. For someone with a less severe deafness, this is a godsend, but for me, my hearing loss is so bad that I can’t even hear the silent accents of certain words. After all, people with moderate deafness can not hear them either without the use of devices to improve their hearing.
So hence the important value of speech therapy and lip reading education. I spent most of my life constantly improving my ability to read people’s mouths along with hearing their sounds. As part of hearing their voices, I believe that I analyze those sounds differently than most hearing people. Instead of having an intuitive phonics structure in their head, which they directly translates to the words, I do a big database search in my head for the closest related word that the partial sound may most represent.
To me, “true” sounds exactly the same as “screw”, because I can not detect the distinctive difference of U and W, and the sharp silence of T versus the softer silence of S. So not only do I look for the closest related word to the sounds, I also search for the context of the word accompanished by neighboring sounds. “That’s so true” versus “You drop your screw” are very distinctive for me, and allows me to figure out which word a person would be saying.
But there is a problem with this solution — the inability to interpret multiple words. I become far more reliant on the subject being covered during times like this — not only because I may be unable to interpret a word, but for several important reasons: Inability to see a person’s lips; too much background noises; and too different of an accent.
Accents are part of what make a verbal language so interesting. It help identify the person’s origin, along with their upbringing. The deeper drawl of a Southern accent is probably the best accent for me to interpret sounds, due to the more audiable silent sounds, and the careful emphasis of the words compared to other accent make them clearer for me.
In a conference room with three co-workers this past week, one a Western accent, one sharp Asian accent, and a Southern accent; I realized that I was able to understand the person with the southern accents far better than any of the other two accents.
It is to my dismay that despite this huge advantage, this person is fond of changing his subjects, which is a challenge for me, when I finally do make a miss on a word or two he is saying. Not only that, he would start a conversation without waiting for me to focus upon him, making it much of a challenge to catch up.
Being Deaf in a hearing world is an incredibly hard challenge to say the least.
