Practices of Negotiating Responsibility for Troubles in Interaction Involving People with Hearing Impairment

For people with hearing impairment (HI), the need to repair hearing-related troubles within conversation is a constant concern that can significantly impact their everyday life and social relationships. This chapter examines repair sequences initiated by people with HI within two corpora, one comprising video-recorded interaction in audiology appointments, the other, audio-recorded interaction between adults with HI and a chosen familiar conversation partner. In particular, the analysis explores the person with HI’s use of meta-comments (“I can’t hear you”, “you’re mumbling”) in the repair sequences to negotiate responsibility for the hearing trouble between the speakers. The findings highlight that the person with HI has an expectation that their communication partners will adapt their talk for the HI recipient to aid the progress of the conversation.