Hearing levels and hearing handicap in Cantonese-speaking Australians

Thirty monolingual Cantonese-speaking older adult Australians (CSOA-A) and 30 monolingual English-speaking older adult Australians (ESOA-A) completed questionnaires on hearing handicap and were assessed with pure tone threshold audiometry. Responses to self-perceived handicap questions showed that CSOA-A subjects apparently experienced less difficulty in communication than ESOA-A subjects despite having slightly poorer hearing levels. CSOA-A subjects reported difficulty hearing conversation when the average hearing levels reached 39.4 dB HTL, a figure close to the 40–45 dB HTL level proposed in previous studies of Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong as being an indicative divide between those Cantonese speakers who will report hearing problems and those who will report no problems. It appears that aspects of the Cantonese dialect and/or culture may act to reduce the impact of hearing loss on communication and/or increase the likelihood of denial of problems. In particular the tonal character of the Cantonese dialect, which carries significant information via low-frequency pitch changes, may be an advantage to older adults with hearing loss.