What non-speech hearing impairments may occur?
Problems with non-speech hearing are quite rare. You can tell something is wrong by the following symptoms:
- The child hears a sound, but is not able to determine what or who is making it. He does not understand where the source of the noise is, does not distinguish a male voice from a female one (auditory agnosia).
- The child does not perceive music as a whole - he does not distinguish between the pitch of sounds, rhythm, pauses. Doesn't recognize familiar melodies, doesn't remember what he's heard before and what he hasn't. Negative attitude towards music (amusia).
- The child distinguishes sounds, their pitch and volume, but does not remember their combinations (auditory memory defect).
- The child does not correctly evaluate and reproduce the rhythm. The number of beats it reproduces is either less or more than in the original, or their sequence is disrupted (arrhythmia).
Reasons for violation
The cause of problems with non-speech hearing is usually multifactorial:
- Non-speech hearing impairment occurs when the right temporal region of the cerebral cortex, hearing organs, and nervous system are damaged.
- Meningitis, otitis media, scarlet fever, influenza, and head injuries may affect its development.
- The course of the mother's pregnancy matters - whether there were serious complications, whether the mother suffered infections, or took potent drugs.
- A low level of development of non-speech hearing is observed with pedagogical neglect, when a child from an early age grows up mainly in silence, and no one is involved in his development.
Correction methods
If there are visible violations of non-speech hearing, you should contact a specialist - a speech therapist-defectologist, a neuropsychologist, a neurologist, an otolaryngologist. It is important to exclude possible diseases, and if they are identified, undergo treatment and correction. Only after this the child is prescribed a correction program. The speech pathologist selects special exercises that teach the child to distinguish non-speech sounds more subtly.
The environment plays a crucial role in the development of non-speech hearing. It should be educational and filled with different sounds from an early age. It is worth paying the child’s attention to the sound of the wind, the pattering of raindrops, the rustling of leaves underfoot, and introducing him to the sounds of animals and the sound of various musical instruments. By listening to noises, the child accumulates baggage that will later allow him to speak correctly. Non-speech hearing is the basis for speech development, which can and should be developed.
What you need to know about non-speech hearing?
Non-speech hearing is the capture and differentiation of various sounds of the surrounding world. As well as distinguishing sounds by volume, duration, height, quantity, determining the source and direction of the sound. The dominant hemisphere of the brain (in right-handed people, the right one), its temporal region, is responsible for non-speech hearing.
Stages of development
A person’s auditory perception begins to form from the moment of birth. From distinguishing primitive, loud sounds, the child gradually moves on to differentiating tonalities, phonemes and speech sounds.
The most important stage in the development of non-speech hearing occurs in the first 3 years of life:
- The newborn hears loud sounds and reacts to them with a start.
- At 1–2 months, the child tries to determine the source of the sound, turns his eyes and head towards the noise.
- At 3–4 months, the baby differentiates sounds of different quality (piano and bell), as well as homogeneous sounds of different volumes.
- At 3–6 months, the ability to distinguish intonations develops, and then to express one’s emotions using shades of voice.
- From 6 months to one year, the child perceives increasingly subtle sounds of the environment (the rustle of a bag and the rustle of paper), catches the rhythm of a word (a watch - titi, a pencil - tatatat). It distinguishes people's voices and responds to them in different ways.
- At 1 year of age, the child accumulates his ideas about objects and their sounds. He recognizes and remembers how a dog barks, how his favorite toy falls. The baby begins to understand his native speech, but all the words and phrases he hears are still not clearly defined.
- In the 2nd–3rd year of life, speech hearing is actively formed. The child differentiates different sounds in a word, the sound composition of the word. By the end of the 3rd year, he already knows all the sounds, but so far he cannot reproduce them due to the underdevelopment of the articulatory apparatus. For example, a preschooler will have no problem distinguishing falseness if an adult pronounces “calandash” instead of “pencil,” although he himself has not yet pronounced “r.”
Subsequently, non-speech and speech hearing are improved through repeated repetition and pronunciation of sounds and words. The development of hearing and speech is a two-way process. They continue to be actively honed until the age of 9-10. But even in adulthood, development does not stop. It is possible to improve auditory perception at both 20 and 30 years old. You just have to put more effort into it.
Does it need to be developed and why?
Recognition and discrimination of non-speech sounds is the first stage of speech formation. Non-speech hearing allows you to catch the rhythm of words, intonation, pitch, timbre. With its help, the child recognizes a familiar voice, navigates space and learns about the world. It helps to determine what fell and where, how far the car is traveling, what the weather is like outside the window (wind, rain). Thus, the quality of cognition of the surrounding world, speech development, interaction with other people, and safety depend on non-speech hearing. For example, with developed hearing, when crossing the road, a child will hear the noise of an approaching car in time.