An analysis of the communication tactics used by hearing-impaired adults

The aim of this study was to establish whether and to what degree certain t ypes of communication strategies (hearing tactics) used by hearing-impaired adults could be shown to co-occur, and to find out which strategies were m ore likely to be used in which type of communicative situations. A consecut ive series of 100 patients attending an audiological rehabilitation clinic was given a questionnaire asking how often they used each of five different hearing tactics in 11 different situations. 'Avoidance' and 'request for r epetition' were the tactics used most commonly. 'Pretending to hear/underst and' and 'positioning self to improve hearing' were used less frequently, w ith 'interruption' the least commonly used. There was some association betw een tactics and situations but no clear picture emerged. In a reassessment of our methodology and results, we suggest that the future research of comm unication strategies would benefit from a sociolinguistic approach based on the qualitative analysis of naturally occurring discourse (conversation) o f hard-of-hearing people, focusing on the use of different strategies in re lation to communicators' goals in interaction.