At Better Hearing Australia Adelaide Inc 's last Coffee Morning Dr Judith Boswell from Tinnitus SA was the speaker. Shona Fennell reports.

Proficiency in any language consists of three distinct skills - hearing, reading and speaking. But if you can’t hear this is particularly difficult - so how can you know how to pronounce words?

Learning music as a child seems to help them learn speak and lay down strong auditary pathways in the brain. These strong auditary pathways seems to have shown that if someone goes deaf later in life, those who had music training cope better.

A conversation is a two way exchange of information, ideas, thoughts and reasoning. It takes two or more people to have a good conversation. (You can talk to yourself if you like, but it’s likely to be biased!)

If you were disabled and needed a wheelchair your house would be adjusted and modified to allow you to easily move into and out of as well as around the inside of the house so I wondered if there is such a thing as designing houses for deafness.

Summarised from a presentation by Dr. Christopher Lind, Senior Lecturer in Audiology, Speech Pathology and Audiology Flinders University to BHA Adelaide Inc. members during Hearing Awareness Week 2012. Topic: "I'm sorry, would you repeat that?" - Observing how hearing loss affects every day talk.

Sometimes it seems, even in countries like Australia, that only if you have money do you have the right to hear.

How good is lip reading? Can people really read lips without any sound and understand what is being said?

The first ‘hearing aids’ if you could call them that, were hearing trumpets. They were large and cumbersome - like the trumpet on early gramophones. We've come a long way since then :-)

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