Conversation and Adult Acquired Hearing Impairment

It is so commonly reported that it is almost a truism to say that conversation difficulty is the major site of activity limitation/participation restriction for adults who have acquired hearing impairment (HI). As a result, rehabilitative activity in audiology aims to ameliorate these everyday conversation difficulties, and the most common rehabilitation response to these difficulties has been the provision of technological support in the form of hearing aids and cochlear implants. However, residual communication difficulties remain for some adults with HI, and conversation-based interventions (particularly focused on repair strategies), involving both the HI adult and his or her familiar communication partner, are included in many current rehabilitation programs. Yet clinicians share little common understanding of the way everyday conversation is conducted, the ways it may be disrupted by an individual's HI, and the ways in which it may be ameliorated. This issue of Seminars in Hearing attempts to address some of these matters by bringing together clinically oriented research on conversation and adult-acquired HI by authors from the United States, Canada, and Australia.

The eight articles presented here include three review articles and five research articles. The review articles (Lind, Hickson, and Erber; Pichora-Fuller, Goy, and von Lieshout; Caissie and Tranquilla) cover three distinct but closely related matters in HI and conversation and its clinical manifestation, respectively: (1) conversation repair, (2) talker intelligibility, and (3) clinical instruction for communication partners. Three of the remaining research articles (Tye-Murray, Mauzé, and Schroy; Skelt; Lind, Campbell, Davey, Rodgers, Seipolt and Akins) address elements of face-to-face interaction, including the sociolinguistic analysis of turns at talk as well as analyses of prosodic and visual cues to interaction. By contrast, Kaplan and Holmes present interesting data on telephone conversation and adult HI. Both Kaplan and Holmes and Sparrow and Hird report on the clinical outcomes of conversationally focused aural rehabilitation programs for adults with acquired HI and their conversation partners.

Together, these articles present some of the common threads of research and clinical activity in conversation and adult HI. Several different methodological approaches are represented here, and the result is a range of outcomes and issues that clinicians will find useful for clinical activities. I am delighted to have had the opportunity to edit this collection and thank Catherine Palmer for her encouragement to do so, and all participating authors for their willingness to contribute.