Hearing ability takes an inevitable role in daily living at home as well as work place. There is confusion between the terms “hearing and listening”, so they are used interchangeably. Hearing means ideally sensory experience of the physical vibration caused by the source and listening means making meaning out of the sound you hear. However, everyone means that hearing is the possibility to detect and recognize meaningful environmental sounds, to identify the source and location of a sound, and, most importantly, to perceive and understand spoken language.
The ability of an individual to carry out auditory tasks in the real world is influenced not only by his or her hearing abilities, but also by a multitude of situational factors, such as background noise, competing signals, room acoustics, and familiarity with the situation etc., Such factors are important regardless of whether one has a hearing loss, but the impact is more when hearing is impaired. For example, when an individual with normal hearing engages in conversation in a quiet, well-lit setting, visual information from the speaker’s face, along with situational cues and linguistic context, can make communication quite effortless. In contrast, in a noisy environment, with poor lighting and limited visual cues, it may be much more difficult to carry on a conversation or to give and receive information. A person with significant hearing loss may be able to function very well in the former situation but may not be able to communicate at all in the latter. To be continued ………
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