Can you tell me about oral successes?

What do oral "successes" sound like? Do they have noticeable accents? If you're good at talking, do people ask you where you're from? Do they think you have some kind of cognitive impairment? Or do they pretend not to notice anything?

How well can lipreading work? Assuming you're really good at it, what does that mean? Does it mean you can carry on a normal conversation? Are there specific words or sounds that make that harder? And would you be able to figure out if someone whose lips you were trying to read was actually speaking some other language that you didn't understand?

And do people who were raised oral ever decide to learn ASL and become part of the Deaf community? Is that odd, or does it happen a lot? Are they well-received if they do?

What do you mean by "oral success"?

Someone who feels like he or she can succeed in a primarily oral environment, whether using spoken, written, or signed language (or by lip-reading, as you mentioned)? Or someone who is successfully able to use spoken language (both listening and speaking) to communicate?

Or something else?

I was thinking of someone who'd been raised without sign language, but had managed to "fake it" okay by talking and lipreading. Is that plausible at all? What would be a better way to refer to that? Mainstream success?

By someone who 'fakes it' okay, do you mean a deaf person who never tells anyone he or she is deaf and pretends to be a hearie?

I think my father did that somewhat -- even our own family wasn't aware of his hearing loss as a young man. But I don't think he was 'faking' -- I doubt even he realized the degree of loss until it was severe. He was very successful by all accounts, though.

I was born HoH (can't use phone and use lipreading and can talk) and so far I'm 33 years old with my own house, car and job. So yes it can be done. And there are many others who have done so even Helen Keller did ok.

The challenge is the speech therapy because obviously when you can't hear yourself talk you don't have some feedback. So what I did was learn how to say sounds and recall them from memory.

I don't know. Does that happen a lot? What I had in mind was more like just never asking for accommodations and pretending to understand everything. Is that plausible? That someone might be able to understand enough by lip-reading, and guess enough from context, and speak well enough, that the people they interacted with could just act normally and forget about accommodations for the most part? (I come at this with experience in a different disability-related community, and there's a lot of pressure to do all of the adapting and compensating ourselves, and never ask normal people to make allowances, but just act normal. I assume there are similar pressures on you; is that correct? Didn't there used to be pressure not to sign in public because it looked weird? Or have you guys been luckier than I thought?)

RandomHearie said:

I don't know. Does that happen a lot? What I had in mind was more like just never asking for accommodations and pretending to understand everything. Is that plausible? That someone might be able to understand enough by lip-reading, and guess enough from context, and speak well enough, that the people they interacted with could just act normally and forget about accommodations for the most part? (I come at this with experience in a different disability-related community, and there's a lot of pressure to do all of the adapting and compensating ourselves, and never ask normal people to make allowances, but just act normal. I assume there are similar pressures on you; is that correct? Didn't there used to be pressure not to sign in public because it looked weird? Or have you guys been luckier than I thought?)

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I wish we could find a way to seal your ears off completely for one month, and at the end, see if you think any of this is possible at all.

(A proud oral failure here.)

I'm just speaking from my own experiences so please don't assume that I fit the mold of every other HoH person. Just a FYI I went to a deaf school for summer camp and I hated it because there's barely any freedom. (You have to ask for permission to even buy a coke at the nearby 7-11!)

I've found that 90% of the time I don't even explain that I'm HoH and that I have to look at them and read their lips and yada yada and I have no issues. But rarely I do come across people who don't like to look at people when talking and I have to say, "Excuse me, I'm hard of hearing and I have to read your lips to understand you" In my personal experiences I've done that maybe 3-4 times a YEAR and some of those people are too difficult to work with. I've had people try to communicate with me by writing it down on paper even when I'm clearly talking to them and I'm understanding what they're SAYING to me.

Now you might think why don't I just explain to everyone I meet that I'm HoH? I've noticed from experiences that if I announce to the world that I'm HoH it actually makes things MORE difficult. They then start treating me like a "special" person and ttt....aaa...llll....kkk.... rrreea......lllll.....yyyy ssssslooooo.....wwwwlllyyyyy

and ironically it makes it more difficult to understand them since I'm used to normal conversation.

And I've never done ASL and haven't bothered with it because let's face it we live in a "hearing" world. I wouldn't have my job if I only knew how to do ASL.

^^^^^^^^^^^
But wasn't he asking about deaf people? Which is a whole different ballgame from hoh people.

Lots of hoh people can blend in, depending on degree of loss.

Bottesini: point taken. I just sort of figured it would be possible to fake it even if you had no clue what was going on because, well, that's what I've done and seen others do. I mean, obviously I could guess that it wouldn't work for the Deaf person, but presumably that's not what the parents care about. (Or maybe I'm just cynical, but as another minority that can be born to members of the majority group, I've mostly seen parents who want their children to act normal at the expense of actually making out well in life.) Thank you for correcting me. So, what does happen? Do people usually communicate badly and/or seem very odd? What kind of experiences did you have that make you call yourself an "oral failure?" Did your family try and fail to teach you to talk? Or what?

A Nihilist, cool. That's interesting, that people trying to make it easier by talking slower actually makes things harder. Can I ask how much hearing you're able to rely on when talking with people? Are you mostly lipreading or mostly listening or is it equal parts of both?

Mostly lipreading, if someone's not facing me I cannot understand them. With my hearing I can only make out vowels and a few consonants. I don't rely on hearing that much I just use whatever I can help fill in the blanks because sometimes lipreading isn't accurate. Some letters look real similar to each other such a "C" and "Z" likewise for "B" and "P"

Oral Successes

Being a successful oral communicator is so much easier today than it was 30 years ago. It is easiest to speak well if you hear well, and today's cochlear implants and hearing aids enable children to do just that. Check out the kids who were implanted early at cochlearimplantonline.com/site/life/speaking-up-for-themselves/

Bottesini said:

^^^^^^^^^^^
But wasn't he asking about deaf people? Which is a whole different ballgame from hoh people.

Lots of hoh people can blend in, depending on degree of loss.

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I would strongly quibble with that. Yes a kid with say unilateral loss can do very well, but even mild loss HOH folks can struggle significently.

RandomHearie said:

And do people who were raised oral ever decide to learn ASL and become part of the Deaf community? Is that odd, or does it happen a lot? Are they well-received if they do?

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Quite a few do yes. I know that it wasn't that unusual for Clarke School or other oral school (real ora school not just oral preschool) to learn ASL as a second language. It's very rare for "oral sucesses" to completly fit in. Even a lot of the oral deaf adults who are Oral Deaf AG Bell members say they don't feel like they fit in with hearing people.

deafdyke said:

I would strongly quibble with that. Yes a kid with say unilateral loss can do very well, but even mild loss HOH folks can struggle significently.

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Quibble??

Fine! Slaps you across the face with my gauntlet! :P

Well, that's quite confusing.

deafdyke, when they do that, are they generally well-received? Do they become as much members of the community as those who grew up in it? What does it feel like for them to find it, if you happen to know?

A Nihilist, what kind of clues do you use to help figure out what someone is saying?

Wirelessly posted (Blackberry Bold )

RandomHearie - you are aware that only maximum 30% of speech is actually visible on the lips/mouth ... The rest is all guess work.

To be honest the idea that you seem to equate "oral success" and being able to "fake being hearing" as something important or even beneficial is a bit insulting - and that's coming from someone who technically could have both those titles inflicted on myself by the outside.

I might be able to speak and sound "hearing" - but I'm not and will never BE a "hearing person", nor do I WANT to pretend to be one.

As a person, I'm far more proud that I am bi-lingual and bi-cultural (bi-bi) and for all the positives that have come from my life and experiences as a hoh/Deaf person.

Btw - even oral only deaf are going to use accommodations like visual signallers, tty, etc.
Regardless of your communication methods, hoh and deaf people are STILL hoh and deaf.

Try watching TV on mute with no captions for a week - and let us know how well you 'faked it' in terms of following along.

Who would choose to be left out of life, just so a few people might not know they're deaf (but probably think they're stupid - due to lack of responses, inaccurate/inappropriate responses etc).

I'd rather people know I'm hoh/Deaf - it's certainly not something I'm embarrassed about!!

Anij, wow. I'm actually really glad to hear that. Not the part about only 30% of speech being visible, but the other part. I have personally experienced having other people conflate seeming normal with being successful, and being expected to pretend to belong to the majority group that I don't belong to. I just assumed you guys would experience the same kind of pressures, and I'm actually glad that you don't. (Honestly, if you replaced "hoh/Deaf" with the appropriate term for me, I could've written that myself, if I were about twice as confident as I really am and had any reason at all to expect the majority to listen. But I'm not and I don't.) By the way, I hope someday you guys share the secret of how you managed to get a healthy community going and mostly not be isolated and miserable. That's something I'd love to emulate.

So, better question: what's the best way to communicate with people who don't know ASL? And what does successful communication with hearies look like, for you?

The best way to communicate with a "hearie" who doesn't know ASL-write or speak.
Never considered "how it looks".

aside: I have taken SpeechReading (lip reading) at Canadian Hearing Society/Toronto a few years ago. The 30% figure is correct-if one is paying "close attention" to the conversation.

drphil, you have a CI, right? Does that make it easy for you to talk and understand speech?

What kinds of things did you learn in your SpeechReading class?