Accents and Hearing Loss

I often get the comment that it’s hard to understand people with accents from our patients with hearing loss.

Let’s look at the SCIENCE to understand why:

Did you know that our ability to recognize the sounds and patterns of a specific language closes by age 8-10? Therefore, even if we TRY to decipher the sounds someone with an accent is producing, it’s HARDER for everyone.

However, if we have hearing loss, it’s that MUCH HARDER because of:

• Reduced Sound Input: Less auditory information limits specific sound nuances.

• Accent Recognition Difficulty: Hearing loss may impair the ability to distinguish between different accents and speech patterns largely because of the different patterns of sound. We call this the rhythm of sound. If we haven’t grown up listening to sound in this way, our brain needs extra effort and time to comprehend it.

• Cognitive Load: Increased effort to comprehend speech can lead to fatigue and frustration.

What can help:

• Instead of asking people to repeat, ask them to explain something in a DIFFERENT way. This uses different consonants and vowels that you may be able to pick up more easily, depending on your specific hearing loss.

Be patient, understand that we are all trying to COMMUNICATE a message between one another. In fact, asking the person to SLOW down their speech can help you understand it better too.