Living with hearing loss can be frustrating at times. The condition makes it harder to understand speech and move around your environment confidently, often leading to social isolation and loneliness. When you first get hearing aids, the amplified speech will help you reconnect to the people in your life. One way to further improve your speech understanding is auditory training.
What is Auditory Training?
Auditory training, also called auditory rehabilitation, is a program that teaches the brain to understand speech. It’s a common tool for people with auditory processing disorder, where the ears deliver sound, but the brain has trouble comprehending it, but it can also help you understand speech after long periods of not hearing it.
Auditory Training Tools
There are specific auditory training exercises you can do to improve speech understanding, including:
- Speech-in-noise training: you listen to speech with background noise overlayed and try to parse out the words
- Phoneme recognition: focuses on separating similar words and syllables, like “fifteen” and “fifty”
- Text following: you listen to audio and follow along with the text to improve active listening and comprehension skills
- Auditory memory: you listen to words or sentences and attempt to recall or summarize what you heard to strengthen memory and attention
You can reinforce these exercises through two enjoyable forms of auditory training: watching TV and listening to audiobooks. These entertaining forms of auditory training have two benefits:
- Speech comprehension. When you tune in to a show you enjoy or listen to a favorite audiobook, your ears receive a steady stream of speech and background noise. This helps your brain re-engage with speech comprehension
- Hearing aid acclimation. Because it deprives your brain of auditory stimulation, amplified sound can initially feel unusual or even overwhelming. Watching TV or listening to audiobooks provides a comfortable, familiar way to ease back into hearing this new sound.
Honing your speech comprehension skills helps you communicate with others and reduces the effort it takes to listen and understand. For extra communication strategies or to learn more about the benefits of hearing aids, contact our experts at Augusta – Aiken ENT & Allergy today.