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.


... Humpty Dumpty was pushed.

--- PPoint 3.01