It’s that time of year when we’re preparing for the holidays, and what do we picture when we imagine the holidays? Big gatherings, lots of people, usually gathered around a table to share meals. If you close your eyes and imagine the sounds coming from that scene, perhaps it’s a mixture of clinking glasses, dishware, children and conversations. And yet, how can we tell all of these sounds apart, and then choose to focus on the person we’re chatting with? Researchers call this process of separating out sounds from a messy cluster auditory scene analysis, a process that requires not just our ears, but also our brain.
Now imagine who’s at this table. If you’re having a big family gathering, you may be fortunate enough to have some grandparents joining you at your table. Or perhaps you have a relative who had an ear infection as an infant, a family member who works at a construction site or someone who served in the military. All of these groups of people may be particularly susceptible to hearing loss, although it can go undiagnosed by many. A recent article estimating the national prevalence of hearing loss in the U.S. found that although roughly 65% of older adults in the U.S. had at least mild hearing loss (think of finding it hard to follow along with whispered conversations), only 29% reported using hearing aids. The World Health Organization estimates that more than 1.5 billion people have some form of hearing loss.
In short, it is likely that someone at your table is hard of hearing, a term that is used by those with mild to severe hearing loss to describe themselves. But why should we care?
While we might be tempted to think that a decrease in ear function is the main contributor to hearing loss, there is a rich history of research that tells us that the difficulties that people face in noisy environments are not merely due to an ear that doesn’t function in the typical way. Consider a home game at Notre Dame Stadium, or even just walking into Duncan Student Center at lunchtime. How much harder is it to have a conversation in those settings than it is to have one in a quiet dorm room? If you imagine yourself straining in those spaces to have a conversation, or that you feel drained after trying to have one, that is an illustration of added listening effort. When we have to exert ourselves to meet the demands of listening, researchers call the amount of exertion one’s listening effort.
Research suggests that when the speech environment is not clear, we recruit additional brain regions to help understand complex speech. Although we may understand everything just the same, we have to work extra hard to do so. This is doubly true for the hard of hearing, who already have a lower-quality representation of sounds, and now have to work harder to figure out what is being said.
The thing is, our listening effort can only be maintained for so long. At some point, either our mental resources will be tapped out while trying to keep up in conversation, or we will lose the motivation to keep that amount of effort up. Both declines in resources and motivation can lead to declines in listening effort exerted. In my anecdotal experiences listening to various hard of hearing community members speak in my classes, they talk about not wanting to go to certain venues or attend certain events because they don’t feel that they can meaningfully engage. This lines up with research and reviews that suggest that hearing loss in older adults is associated with increased social isolation.
So what can we do about this? There are a couple of simple things to consider when having conversations in noisy spaces:
- Use visual cues. A long line of research shows us that a lot of auditory information is influenced by concurrent visual signs (a sound illusion known as the McGurk effect is a great example!). In cases where sound signals are less clear, we tend to rely more on visual information to help interpret sounds. This can be using your hands to indicate what you’re speaking about, facing the other person so they can see your mouth when you talk, and so on.
- Indicate when the topic of conversation has shifted. Humans are incredibly good at predicting words based on prior context, which makes processing new information more efficient overall. However, this also means that for someone who might not be able to pick up sounds as well, they can’t tell when their predictions are wrong, so they might continue to mishear words based on the prior conversation topic.
- Avoid mumbling or trailing off at the ends of sentences. We tend to do this in situations where we might be finishing up a point or think the last thing isn’t as important, but this makes what we say really hard to hear. If someone asks what you said, try your best to repeat the point. Saying something like “oh, that wasn’t important” leaves the listener wondering what was said and how much they could have missed, as well as feeling unimportant.
- Look out at the rest of the group every so often. Is someone sitting around not being engaged by conversation, or with a strained look or a blank stare on their face? If we’re not looking at someone’s face, we usually can infer their participation in conversation by them speaking up, but a person who cannot keep up with conversation may be less inclined to speak up. It may well be that they are content sitting on their own, but it can feel isolating to not be able to break into conversation the same way others can. These people also tire of repeating “I can’t hear” as their way to be involved.
Regardless of whether someone at the table is hard of hearing or not, we all have to exert listening effort in noisy situations, including on campus. We can make the holidays, and public areas as a whole, a more accessible space for everyone if we make some small changes to how we have conversations with each other.
Vanessa Chan-Devaere
Assistant Teaching Professor, Department of Psychology
Nov. 14
