There are many factors effecting the communication with hearing deficient people. To know some hints about the hearing problems make you get a better communication with these people.
Reading lips: You may hear that “sometimes I do not hear anything if I not wear my glasses”. This shows that people use “lip reading” method. People learn this in years without aware of it.
Some people take course about lip reading. Whatever the case if one looks to the face of the talking person he/she understands better. If person smokes, chews gum, close his/her mouth while talking, hearing deficient people are effected worse by these conditions. They not only cause hearing problem but also differentiation problem.
Attention: People frequently say that “he/she hears when he/she wants to”. Sometimes people hear without any difficulty. This happens in an ideal place that can be described as “quiet place, people are close to each other, speaking clearly (good pronunciation). If the environment is noisy, people cannot see each other (like talking from another room), and talk bad pronuncation, then it is very difficult to hear and understand what is said.
Voice regulation: Hearing aids only icrease the strength of the sound. They do not effect the quality. If you shout to a person with hearing aid it may be worse since sound can disturb the person. It is true to speak clearly to be better understood by hearing aid using people.
Another important thing is not to decrease the strength of your voice at the end of the sentence.
Pronunciation: Even if the hearing aid is convenient one cannot understand if the pronunciation is bad. Important thing is to speak in a normal strength with good pronunciation. To better understand this lets explain by writing:
“Bax proxxnciaitoxn causxx less dixxrimaniton of the xxrds by the peopxx.”
Velocity: Some famous people are famous because of their high speed speaking. This is bad for differention of the words. Like this:
“Itisdifficulttounderstandpeoplewhoarespeakingquickly.”
Words last less than a second while speaking. During that time brain tries to understand and give a meaning to it. If speaking is quick time is limited to evaluate it especially if we think that speaking is a continuos process.
Type of speaking: The most difficult thing is to discriminate word goups for a hearing impaired person. So try to choose appropiate words and spell them nicely to be understood. Like better to say “would you like to read the newspaper?” instead of “would you like to see the paper?”