This week I learned about the differences in empathy and sympathy and attempted to empathize with any individuals who may experience hearing loss. Using a hearing loss simulator, I listened to a short conversation between a man and his grandchild at different levels of hearing loss and attempted to transcribe the whole conversation. I consider myself to have pretty good listening skills and do not normally have any issues with communication, so listening to this conversation on the ‘moderate’ hearing loss setting was a bit shocking at first. As you can see in my transcriptions below, I was able to make out most of the conversation, but a lot of this had to do with inferences I was making to make the words make sense. When I listened through a second time on the ‘mild’ hearing loss setting, I realized how much I had actually missed the first time through. I noticed that I had heard some words wrong and missed entire sections completely. I finally listened a third time through on the ‘normal’ setting (no hearing loss) and was shocked at how different some of my inferences were from what the man and child were actually saying. I noticed that there were certain tones that were harder to understand than others. For example, I was able to understand almost all of what the man said due to his low and powerful tone, but the child had a higher pitch voice and was much softer when communicating which made understanding them more difficult. This experience made me empathize with some of my older relatives who have a hard time communicating with me or my mom, but seem to hear my brother and father with no issue. Even though I try my hardest to speak clearly around them, I now understand that this higher and softer tone of voice is just more difficult to understand with hearing loss. My (rough) transcriptions are included below. These transcriptions were completed while listening to the conversation all three times. I have also included the real transcription from the conversation for comparison. As you can see, the real transcription and my ‘normal’ transcription are pretty similar, an indicator that I do not experience any hearing loss. What is not indicated on any of the transcriptions is the ability to hear inflection and personality within the conversation. When listening to the conversation with mild and moderate hearing loss, I was only able to hear and focus on the actual words spoken, but when this factor was taken away, I heard the snuffles, laughs, brightness, and inflection in the conversation. References: Clare-Rothe, J. (2011). Hear [Photograph]. Flickr. https://www.flickr.com/photos/imagengine/6245030138
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