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Well I think the most important thing to do when you are describing test results
to a parent is to actually take them into the booth
and let them listen to the test themselves and let them hear the difficulty of
those tests, and then explain to them how their child did on those, and then what
is the real life application of the performance of their child on those tests.
For example, your child did not do very well when
the speech was as loud as the background noise. However when I
increased the loudness of the target signal,
your child did much better.
But in real life, that's not a classroom. A classroom is actually much worse. So
therefore I can't even in my
kind of unrealistic environment say that your child does have difficulty
processing in the presence of background noise.
I also like to think of it in a way that
if the auditory system is normal and the signal is normal, whether it be a
tone or speech, then the person is going to perform normally on those types of tests.
If the auditory system is normal and the signal is degraded, they're going to do
fair to good.
If the auditory system is abnormal, but
the speech presented or the signal presented is normal, again they are going to do
fair to well.
But if the auditory system is abnormal and the signal is degraded, then they're
not going to do well, and that's a pretty basic, that's a theory from Teatini from
the early seventies that I like to use to explain to parents, but it's not just
about understanding speech, because what we're doing is testing with tones as
well. We are testing with how well can your child hear the gaps between phonemes,
syllables, and sentences, you know
and how well can they understand when the speech is rapid
or patterns, tone patterns, which of course, all have applicability to speech,
but we don't just test with speech.