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Is it possible to re-learn word recognition / speech discrimination?

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Hi all,

I am wondering if it is possible to practice word recognition and if doing so would help in the real world at all?

I’ve had significant hearing loss since I was born and am now 51. A recent speech recognition score was significantly lower than it was four years ago. The dispenser said my brain is forgetting how to process words (she used nicer language than that) which impacts how much assistance I can receive from hearing aids. I live on hearing aids and it distresses me that they may not be much help, say when I hit 60.

Can I ever train my brain to discriminate land from lamb, pry from pie, some from sun, etc?? I thought that perhaps five or ten minutes a day, listening to random words from my computer might jumpstart some brain cells that are apparently not getting much practice. Is there such a program out there?

Thank you!

: Resound Forzas, replacing before the end of the year (probably with Phonak B-R).

Hz 250 500 750 1k 2k 3k 4k 5k 8k
L 60 55 65 75 90 80 80 70 65
R 65 65 65 70 80 75 75 65 60

Speech
L : 70dB : 76% / 95
R SRT: 75dB WRS: 52% / 95 dB

12 people in this conversation6 min readJump to latest
Edited

There has been a study in Japan about using transcranial direct stimulation over the auditory complex and they were able to show improvement in a subject’s speech discrimination Anodal transcranial direct current stimulation over the auditory cortex improved hearing impairment in a patient with brainstem encephalitis - PubMed16 I don’t believe that this has ever been done outside of Japan and the study only involved one patient so take it for what it is.

here is an online program called LACE training which is supposed to help you better discriminate speech in noisy settings. I am currently doing the LACE training. It costs $75 for 11 online sessions and seems good.
I’m trying to learn speechreading to supplement my hearing. I found that lipreading.org43 is a pretty good site and you can get most of the lessons for free.

There was a published study earlier this year that found LACE training did not improve outcome measures:

A Randomized Control Trial: Supplementing Hearing Aid Use with Listening and...4

Findings from this randomized controlled trial show that LACE training does not result in improved outcomes over standard-of-care hearing aid intervention alone. Potential benefits of AT may be different than those assessed by the performance and...

Some real life benefit may be obtained from learning lip reading techniques and how to use context in the sentence to help follow conversation or work out a word.

Edited

I don’t read lips much but for sure I use context in the sentence to help me figure out words. Before I was fitted in the earlier day, I had to do this even more when I started having hearing loss but didn’t wear any yet.

I agree with you that changes in can be simply an off day etc. When I initially lost my hearing due to encephalitis, my left ear scored 52% and my right ear scored 96% at my audiologist. I had two additional tests done at Costco. My right ear remained the same but my left ear showed 88% and then 92%. All tests were done using recorded speech at 65db. My hearing loss is due to damage to the nerve connections in the brain stem so my left ear has better tone scores, but my right ear is my real better ear as that is the ear I would use to understand on the phone etc.

Anyway, I agree that technology coupled with speech reading and self advocacy are the only real ways to “regain” lost communication.

In reply to #7

@Neville said: (unavailable)

That tDSC study is pretty weak. They don’t report the specifics of the word discrimination scores, and even with 50-word lists the test re-test deviation in word discrimination is VERY high. For example, say you do a 25-word list from the NU6 words and get 70% at one appointment, and then you get 50% at your next appointment. This is not actually a significant difference–it could just as easily have gone the other way and it doesn’t mean anything. To be frank, a lot of audiologists don’t know this (and my bet would be that almost NO hearing instrument specialists know this) and put more stock into the word recognition scores than is really warranted. Drops are more significant at the ends of the score; that is, a drop from 100% to 88% is significant, or a drop from 36% to 0% is significant, but a drop from 52% to 28% is not. To get a really good measure, you’d have to do hundreds of words. On the up-side, this may mean that you have actually NOT suffered a significant drop in your WRS scores and you were just having a bad day.

In any case, with your level of hearing loss I do think it would be worthwhile looking into a Roger Pen system if that is something that might be available to you. It also never hurts to work on alternative strategies–environmental modification, speech reading, self-advocacy, conversation repair strategies, etc.

Yep, never had much faith in as there’s too much environmental instability in the tests even before you consider the actual statistical weakness.

Even the claimed side by side tests for different fittings within the same environment aren’t the best, which is why there is always a leap of faith with new hearing systems. Add to that 12-18 week habituation and you’re struggling even more to find which aids ‘sound better’ vs the ones that ‘work better’.

Accidents/trauma, scar tissue, disease.

Mine dropped significantly due to Meniere’s.

In reply to @spingee

@spingee said:

How can you even lose wrs? Is it just severe+ hearing loss or delaying wearing HAs?

Original poster here. I do have a severe+ loss but have worn for about 40 years. I lip-read, and my ability to compensate and “fill in the gaps” is quite good, according to the sentence comprehension portion of my last test. However, listening takes a tremendous amount of work and I find myself sometimes just tuning out borderline audible (to me) speech. I also use closed captioning whenever possible. Add to that hearing changes that normally occur with aging, the dispenser’s comment about my brain forgetting how to process certain sounds due to lack of exposure to them…well, I don’t know if the she’s correct, but she’s not implausible. I would like to try listening to random words for a few minutes a day to see if that enhances my ability to listen in any way.

Thanks everyone for your comments and suggestions.

In reply to @Um_bongo

@Um_bongo said:

By understanding that the development of sensorineural loss is more akin to macular degeneration rather than just a lowering of volume.

I am not sure what that means, as I do not know much about macular degeneration. Here is my attempt to understand why does not necessarily match a given loss or even necessarily is following an increasing loss in any linear way for an individual. The pure tone loss is just that, a measure of which decibel you are able to hear a certain tone at. Making out sound in speech is much more complex and thus an individual may have a mild moderate loss (for example), but something more going un with the nerve damage that further inhibits speech recognition. Is that a correct understanding? My WRS is in the 70’ies on the left ear and I see people here with worse loss and much better WRS.

and don’t tone scores don’t always line up. Consider someone with an auditory processing issue who might have a normal and poor WRS. You could have the same tone scores as someone else, but much different WRS. Everyone’s loss is different.

In reply to @spingee

I had a related experience about 8 years ago. My right aid (I may have been wearing AGX aids at the time?) started to slowly fail on me over about a year’s time. In fact, in testing the aid, my aud-guy said it was working at about 80% (vs my working left aid, which had no problems).

By the time I really noticed it (putting that aid in my ear first, and noticing how much lower the overall volume was!), my right ear had fallen from about 80-odd percent to low 50s. It was really shocking how fast it fell. I got that aid fixed, and even better, bought a new pair of ITEs. I forced myself to use that right ear on the phone to try and retrain my brain to interpret speech again on that side. In about a year, I had another hearing test, and my WRS was up to 80% on that side. I was stunned.

I do think that “lazy listening” (either due to poor attention or malfunctioning aids, or needing aids) can lead to a loss of speech discrimination ability over time. But my own experience (I was about 53 at the time) seemed to indicate that improvement can occur over time and active listening. I think that streamers and listening devices to help deliver CRISP CLEAR sound into the ears helps to once again re-learn speech. Then you can challenge your brain/ear connection with using a phone, listening to the TV (or laptop), watching shows where folks speak with accents and making an effort to interpret what they’re saying.

In reply to @Abarsanti

@Abarsanti said:

I found that lipreading.org is a pretty good site and you can get most of the lessons for free.

Nice! Thanks.

I found that I ‘hear’ what the people are saying while reading their lips. About just under my hearing threshold loudness. Very funny.

So I think it is prove I’ve been reading lips for years. :slight_smile:
For the multiple-choice I usually get 10xx of 1200. Only numbers are 1200 and context is 8xx. (But I am not a native speaker, so that’s double impairment.)

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