So I’m rehearing my script for my Mainstreaming video and it’s really fascinating looking at how DHH people learn and process information in comparison to hearing people. Hearing people have the benefit of audial processing. Since you’re a child you tune into background information. Some of it may be ambivalent, but you still learn and shape how people talk and use words.
Deaf people are more visual learners. Obviously, they need to see the information. Their memory works differently. Hearing people have the ability to “hear” words and it correlates with what they read and write. Deaf people have to understand words without sound, therefore they have to organize that knowledge differently - a concept many mainstream educators fail to understand.
But as a Hard of Hearing person….
I can understand words and language in terms of sound, but I do not do well with retaining audial information. I put so much effort into hearing that I don’t process what I’m receiving. A lot of times I walk away from a conversation and I cannot recall a single word someone said. It always baffles me that people can recall real life conversations (my dad always used to lecture me by asking, “Remember what I told you before?”). I can easily recall conversations in books and movies because I have the visual information to go with (captioning/ + sound). But I’ve always been a visual learner and prefer the hands-on approach.
Just think, if more educators took the time to understand how we all process information differently, we wouldn’t have half of our graduating DHH population coming out with only a fourth grade reading level.
And yes, I know, “All kids learn differently” and “Some hearing people too” - that wasn’t the point of this post.
As HOH, this makes so much sense why I can understand words and language but can’t remember well hearing conversations.
That why I can’t stand when people say shit well you can hear this but not this. I can’t process sound information well. It has nothing to do with hearing sounds, processing it is a challenge.
I, too, have sometimes walked away from conversations without remembering anything said because the challenge of trying to understand them through lipreading absorbed so much brain processing power there was simply nothing left over to focus on trying to process and retain the meaning. (There is research showing that people who require a lot more brain processing than usual just to decode print have less processing power left over to understand and retain the content–think what that means for people with dyslexia, and consider what that means for everyone who has to lipread in conversations.) Lipreading is really hard even for the “champion” lip readers who you think are catching everything you say. (I say “think” because so many of us are so good at social bluffing that hearing people may end up with an inflated idea of how well we really lipread–google “social bluffing”).
When I woke up from surgery nearly two years ago, I was able to start sort of speaking again maybe 15 minutes after recovering from the anesthesia (though it continued to feel really weird and unnatural and tiring for another few hours), but my lip reading ability went completely bye bye until the next morning because, at least for me, lip reading consumes that much more energy than speaking. And even speaking isn’t as easy for me as it is for others. If they hadn’t been ready with a handwritten message (explaining that the surgery was now over and I was now in the recovery room) and with a video remote interpreting hook up to ask me about my pain levels and help them understand when I signed my responses (left handed, because my right arm was stiff and took longer to recover) then I wouldn’t have been able to communicate in those first 15 minutes of recovery.
Googling social bluffing*
You just pointed out something I didn’t think about until now. No wonder hearing people think we lip-read so well.
Yeah … I should probably stop doing it and actually just tell people more often that I’m completely lost and need a complete restructuring of how group communication is done in order for me to be genuinely included in the conversation. Sometimes I do, in fact, tell people this and sometimes have had success in getting people to just write things down more, or even help me out with a kind of ongoing transcript of the conversation. But I think for at least some of us (maybe me, at least) it may be partly a kind of a defense mechanism: some hearing people, as you know, get grouchy and impatient if you hint that you need more than an occasional repetition to follow along. So if you don’t yet know the people that well, it can feel threatening and uncomfortable to have to speak out and say, “Sorry, nope, this approach to communication access is completely not working” and easier and safer – albeit more frustrating and lonely – to just pretend and let things go. Then, there are situations where admitting the communication access approach being used has essentially failed you means you are critiquing a strategy people have been using with you for many decades maybe since your early childhood. That is a potentially HUGE and scary conversation to take on that could lead to messy hurt feelings by people who thought their interpreting skills were at least partly okay or that all their work and effort to make you feel included were paying off. It can seem easier and not as emotionally explosive and messy to just carry on with the social bluffing game.
Then there are times when I am simply too tired to keep trying. Just asking for repetition (or for them to write it down) consumes a certain amount of energy, more than it does to just pretend and let it go. And then if they repeat, you have to consume even MORE energy trying hard to catch it this time. Or the third time or the fourth. For deaf/HoH/CAPD* people trying to function in a world that isn’t designed for our communication needs, communication is EXHAUSTING, pushing for full communication access is EXHAUSTING, telling people over and over and over that nope I didn’t catch this, nor that, nor that is EXHAUSTING. All reasons why I think so many of us engage in social bluffing so often. Which then inflates people’s expectations for how much they think we are understanding, which means they don’t try as hard to write things down or otherwise make their communication more completely accessible, which means we have to work harder to understand anything, which increases the temptation to engage in more social bluffing. And so on it goes.
But although I think social bluffing is one reason hearing people think we lipread more than we actually do, I think another factor is that most fictional deaf characters tend to have have SuperPower Champion Lipreading skills that allow them to lipread through walls in pitch dark at 100 paces around corners while people with hairy mustaches covering their lips are speaking with chewing gum in their mouths. Even though people may know intellectually that these are just fictional characters, they often just don’t have any other model for how lipreading actually works and don’t know enough to sort out the realistic from the complete nonsense.
I know I blathered on a long while. Hope it was thought provoking, at least. Could be a big topic for a future video with a lot of inter-related issues to unpack, maybe in coordination with other deaf/HoH/APD YouTubers.[ * CAPD = Central Auditory Processing Disorder (or, some people do without the C for Central). An extremely oversimplified explanation would say that APD means things may sound garbled or unclear to you, and amplifying sounds may sometimes actually make it sound worse. Hearing people with ©APD can have many of the same challenges with communication access as deaf/HoH people, though it is also very common for many deaf/HoH people to have CAPD as well though it often isn’t diagnosed or recognized. ]
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