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Thread. Related to my @AudOTB discussions about hearing vs. understanding earlier this week, a perfect example came up in a spoken English conversation with my spouse. All of the examples in the blog post are from my personal experience too, but this one is also good. 1/
A word that I heard but didn’t understand came up in the conversation. When that happens, my mind immediately starts sorting through all of the words that could possibly fit. Usually, I don’t pay attention to the exact words because this happens so often and so quickly. 2/
In this case, the word was “tribal”. Before arriving at that word, my mind sorted through all of these other words in the following order: trifle, travel, trundle, trouble, and treble. Five wrong words before arriving at the right one. 3/
Piecing words/sentences together from the bits that I catch is a regular part of my daily life, if I have my CI processors on and am communicating in spoken English. Deaf and hard of hearing people have to do this all the time, and after a few hours it gets exhausting. 4/
Even if we’re fluent in a spoken language, it’s exhausting. Sorting through our mental catalogs of possible words requires cognitive effort. We could be using that effort in other ways if we didn’t have to do this all of the time. 5/
In the example above, the parts of the word that I understood were /tr/ and /l/. I understood that the word had two syllables, and I had context from the other words in the sentence and conversation topic. I had to fill in the rest using this information as a starting point. 6/
So my mind searched for words that begin with /tr/, end in /l/, have 2 syllables, and made sense in the context of other words in the sentence and the broader conversation topic. Within a second or less, I had the right word. But the effort I used to get there was a lot. 7/
Not as much effort as I need at times to understand other words that are harder for me to hear, but still much more than would have been required for a hearing person. 8/
Being an audiologist, I also thought about how quickly I found the right word in this example. Quickly enough that if this sentence had been on one of the sentence recognition tests used in audiologic testing, I would have gotten the word and sentence correct on the test. 9/
This is one of the reasons that it’s important for people to know exactly what we are testing for during audiology appointments. The word and sentence tests that we use aren’t tests of the effort required for listening and understanding. 10/
It’s important for audiologists to know the information that we get from those tests. It helps with hearing device programming. It establishes a baseline that we can look back at later when we test the person again so that we can monitor developments, positive or negative. 11/
But from those tests alone, we don’t know how hard the person’s brain was working to get the score that they got. Some people assume that if word and sentence test scores from audiology appointments are high, then the person has almost no trouble with hearing. 12/
This is one reason that we need to educate more on this topic. People need to know what to expect from their hearing devices realistically. Even with hearing devices, a person won’t always understand what was said, and understanding isn’t always easy. 13/end
