Liam O’Dell: Guesswork – do deaf people have an advantage?

Deafness, and the adjustment in communication that comes with it, comes with lots of guessing, so does that make deaf people excellent guessers?

The question comes as I cast my mind back to one of my first-ever articles for The Limping Chicken.

Back in 2014 when I was only taking my first couple of steps into the wider deaf community and as such, was more curious in nature, I asked if deaf people are more empathetic than hearing people.

That made me wonder about other areas where there might be an element of a kind of ‘Deaf Gain’ – of whether being deaf has given us other skills that might set us ahead of our hearing peers.

With deafness involving guesswork when it comes to lipreading, the good old headphone hearing test and following everyday conversations, I do wonder if our ability to make educated guesses is better than that of our hearing peers.

Whenever I meet someone new, I’m quickly asked if I am someone who lipreads, my answer has always been ‘not consciously’ – because it’s something that’s so automatic. That said, I know that the guesswork aspect of lipreading, and of the listening I do, most definitely requires some conscious thought.

For instance, when I take a hearing test, the whistling noise I’m supposed to identify sounds ever so similar to the whining of my tinnitus, so that the test becomes a test of my guessing skills as much as my listening ability.

Translate that over to when I’m watching an episode of The Chase and I’m always amazed when I completely boss a question about Ancient Greek history, despite not actually knowing the answer. Result.

To bring it back to lipreading, though – the clearest example of guesswork from deaf people, with only 30 to 40 percent of spoken words able to be read on the lips – there is a lot of interesting elements which come together as pieces of the auditory puzzle, as it were.

There’s whatever words in that specific sentence we managed to hear, grouping them together, noticing any body language cues which may help, and then, by far the biggest aspect – and the most interesting one – context.

What’s particularly fascinating is our ability to quickly conjure up a list of words and ideas connected with whatever understanding of the conversation we may have.

It’s a fast-paced, mental form of word association, and it’s certainly impressive – even more so when you consider that it isn’t long before we come across new discussions on topics which we may not know much about. With practice, our associations expand and as such, our guesswork is improved.

Such is the nature of lipreading that we often have to make something from nothing, so I wonder how much our guesswork has made us more imaginative thinkers, forcing us to think outside the box?

Of course, guesswork as a concept is unique from person to person, but if we’re talking about word association and second-guessing messages, could it also be that we’ve become better at reading between the lines, and spotting the hidden meanings within everyday conversations?

Photo by Ollie Cole.

Liam is a mildly deaf freelance journalist and blogger from Bedfordshire. He wears bilateral hearing aids and makes the occasional video about deaf awareness on his YouTube channel. He can also be found talking about disability, politics, theatre, books and music on his Twitter, or on his website.