Psychology and hearing impairment: Focussing on the people with the loss

Abstract

Hearing loss has a wide range of repercussions which are easily overlooked. Lipreading is surrounded by psychological issues, involving phenomenology, individual differences, and its interaction with other processes which compete for the same mental resources. Profound loss affects speech production as well as speech reception. The changes which occur in speech production are awkward to describe in standard phonetic terms, yet they can be shown to affect listeners. Novel techniques, which describe the statistics of speech signals considered as acoustic waveforms, measure the abnormalities objectively, and have potentially widespread applications. Deafened people’s own accounts suggest that their loss leads to distinctive experiences which hearing people tend not to understand. Questionnaire and interview techniques confirm that these experiences are widespread, and predict the overall impact of hearing loss better than objecti ve, biomedical measures. As more hearing impaired people have accessed Higher Education, evidence has accumulated that a combination of strategies is needed to meet different needs. These areas reflect a general role for psychology: to ensure that convenient simplifications do not obscure the functioning individual.