How We Hear
Sound waves travel into the ear canal until they reach the eardrum. The eardrum passes the vibrations through the middle ear bones, or ossicles, into the inner ear. The inner ear is shaped like a snail and is also called the cochlea. Inside the cochlea, there are thousands of tiny hair cells. Hair cells change the vibrations into electrical signals that are sent to the brain through the auditory nerve. The brain tells you that you are hearing a sound and what that sound is. (http://www.dangerousdecibels.org/virtualexhibit/2howdowehear.html)
Auditory Training:
Auditory training is a technique used to enhance listening skills and improve speech understanding. It involves formal (focused) listening activities designed to optimize
speech perception through training the cognitive processes that play a role in listening. Improvements in speech understanding can often be seen for hearing aid wearers, even when listening in difficult noisy environments. (https://www.hearingtracker.com/blog/auditory-training-can-enhance-your-residual-hearing/)
The Important Beginning Pieces
Ling 6 Sound Test:
/ahh/, /ooo/, /eee/, /shh/, /sss/, /mmm/
These sounds are selected because they broadly represent the speech spectrum (250-8000Hz). They represent sounds in the low, middle and high frequency range. If you are able to detect all 6 of these sounds, then you are hearing all sounds that are audible across speech.(http://hear-me-now.org/ling-six-sound-test/)
To practice the test, simply either cover your mouth, stand next to or behind the individual and say the sounds. If they have a reaction, turn, or are able to repeat that sound, you can determine that they are able to detect said sound. This is the basis for auditory training. Performing this test daily can ensure that your listening devices are working properly.
The Speech Banana
When the sounds of speech (or phonemes) of all known human languages are plotted on an audiogram, they cluster in a banana-shaped region known as the speech banana. People with normal hearing acuity can also hear sounds outside of the speech banana. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_banana)
You can see the ling sounds plotted in the banana, they range across the spectrum. The goals is to have your hearing be in that range. That ensures that you have access to all of the sounds of speech. It is optimal, however, to have your hearing HIGHER than the banana, which will ensure that you are also able to hear all of the quiet environmental sounds as well sure as dripped water, rustling leaves, and birds chirping.
The Auditory Learning Guide
The auditory learning guide is what we use to help us create goals and track progress with the child’s listening and language development. It is broken down into 5 different levels: Sound Awareness, Phoneme Level, Discourse Level, Sentence Level and Word Level. Each level is broken down into 4 years. This information is based off of the listening and language development of children with hearing loss. NOTE that it is very common to see skills “scattered” across the chart. It’s not uncommon to have skills ranging from the 1-year rage to the 2-year range, 2-year to 3 and 4-year etc... We all learn and process things differently, so this is not a set-in stone “step-by-step” process.
Minimal Pairs/Auditory Discrimination
In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, spoken or signed, that differ in only one phonological element and have distinct meanings. They are used to demonstrate that two phones are two separate phonemes in the language.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_pair) It is the ability to recognize differences between sounds and allows you to distinguish between phonemes in words.(https://www.verywellfamily.com/what-is-auditory-discrimination-2162385)
Some examples of minimal pairs are:
/pin/ vs /bin/ /rot/ vs /lot/(differing in the initial sound) /bin/ vs /bean/ /pen/ vs /pan/(differing in the middle sound) /had/ vs /hat/ /mean/ vs /meme/(differing in the final sound)
This can be a very difficult auditory task and takes a lot of practice and hard work to train your brain to hear those small differences.
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