ridenrain ridenrain:
The man has been in Canadian politics for most of his life and some of that must have been in English.
Since his English skills are so bad, this must have come up before.
If you can show me a news clip or something explaining this "condition" existed prior to this election, I'll consider changing my opinion.
While you're at it, maybe you can tell us why he doesn't have a drivers license.
Does his wife do all the driving?
$1:
"I hear everything when it is isolated, but when it is confused with other sounds it is completely confused," Dion, 52, said Monday during a campaign stop. "My mother has the same problem. It is kind of a hereditary problem, but it does not stop me from listening to Canadians."
It's not an unfamiliar complaint.
Audiologists said they could not comment on Dion's case in particular, and they would not presume to diagnose him, but they do see patients all the time with similar concerns.
"It's very, very common," said Bill Campbell, president of the Canadian Academy of Audiology.
Rex Banks, chief audiologist at the Canadian Hearing Society, said that in general, when people start reporting they're having trouble in noisy situations, it could indicate the beginning of high-frequency hearing loss.
"Sounds that are in the high frequencies, like s's or th's or ch's, they carry less energy than low-frequency sounds like vowels, so they are often masked in noisy environments which means that it's harder to hear them," he said from Ottawa.
Drew Towers, past president of the Alberta College of Speech-Language Pathologists and Audiologists, said the vast majority of people would first notice difficulty hearing when there's background noise, regardless of the cause of the hearing problem.
"Generally speaking anybody with any degree of hearing loss will find noisy situations, or trying to listen to speech in noisy situations, to be the most difficult circumstance they can find themselves in," he said from Red Deer, Alta.
Campbell, an audiologist at the district health unit in Thunder Bay, Ont., said high-frequency hearing loss could be inherited or noise induced.
"A high-frequency hearing loss is usually caused by damage to cells in what's called the cochlea, which is the inner ear, or the organ for hearing. And so damage to those cells just reduces a person's sensitivity to high-frequency sounds."
Banks said high-frequency hearing loss can also be a sign of presbycusis – loss of hearing due to the aging process. The highest pitches are affected first, but later the lower pitches can be affected as well.
"A very typical response of someone to the beginning of high-frequency hearing loss ... they feel people are mumbling, or they have trouble hearing women's voices, or other people with high-frequency voices," he explained.
For anyone noticing such a problem, Towers said the first step would be an assessment by a medical doctor and audiologist.
"Then we decide what is the best course of treatment, if any. And it might be surgical. It might be audiological, which would include hearing aids."
Or, a doctor and audiologist might decide neither one of those is an appropriate solution, depending on the severity and nature of the problem.
If that's the case, there are coping strategies.
Campbell said a person experiencing difficulty should make sure he or she can see the person speaking and try to reduce background noise "whether it's in a crowded restaurant, getting a table in the corner, perhaps lowering the volume of music in the environment, any ambient noise."
Banks agreed that it's important to practise good communication skills: "First of all maintaining eye contact, trying to pick up information from the context of the sentence, positioning yourself appropriately in the room to be closer to the people that you want to talk to, to distance yourself from noise sources."
It's also helpful to consider lighting situations that might be best for communication, he said, and let people know there is a problem and they might need to slow down their speech or to raise their voice.
Towers said that in a news conference situation, it would be easier to hear a question through a microphone than shouted from the back of a noisy room.
And there's encouraging news for those who opt for a hearing aid.
"There is definitely new technology that's really quite good at addressing high-frequency hearing loss today," Banks said.
The devices are designed to amplify high frequencies and filter out low frequencies which are still intact.
Aside from high-frequency hearing loss, Banks said another condition that might cause someone to have difficulty hearing in a crowd situation is central auditory processing disorder – the person's hearing is normal but the brain has a hard time sifting through information to interpret it correctly.
It can be difficult for people with the disorder to focus in on the source, and interpret what's being said in the presence of background noise, he said.
Considering that we all learn to speak entirely by auditory means at a young age its not hard to see why hearing affects speech. Ever listen to a deaf person speak?
Add to that its his second language and yes its a reasonable explanation. Good thing he wasn't in a wheelchair then you really be able to question his abilities.
CKA Uber 
