> 0n (09 Aug 05) Barbara McNay wrote to Cindy Haglund...

 >>>  Well for me anyway corrective lenses help me a lot
 >>> more than a hearing aid
 >>> ever did. :)

 >>  BM> Now, that I can understand.  You can see an improvement
in vision much
 >>  BM> more than you can hear an improvement that the audiologist says is
 >>  BM> there. To my way of thinking, for a hearing aid to
noticeably improve
 >>  BM> your comprehension, it would have to do the equivalent of glasses
 >>  BM> making a totally colorblind person suddenly able to see
green, blue,
 >>  BM> purple, orange, etc., instead of shades of gray.

 >>  Yep that.. and it's really no good at all if all you
 >> get improvement
 >> with by a h.a is volume. While we can get away with
 >> not being able to
 >> discern certain colors, Speech requires tone
 >> discrimination.

 >  BM> OK, I gotcha here, now.  Perhaps you mean
"frequency."  You need to be
 >  BM> able to hear certain frequencies to be able to differentiate among the
 >  BM> consonants.  If you can't hear those frequencies at all,
 >  BM> comprehension, if any, depends very heavily on context.

 >  I later realized I left out a word up there. :)

 >   Comprehending speech requires tone discrimination.
 > If we have no or
 > very few 'hair' (called that as they resemble the
 > shape of hairs, not
 > that they are hairs) cells we can't discriminate
 > tones.

 >  You many be able to hear different tones but not
 > discriminate them in
 > the way we do to understand speech.  And yes about
 > context. I can lip
 > read a little bit but only if I know the context.

And that's full of pitfalls, too, but it helps immensely, nevertheless.

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