AUDITORY SKILLS FOR SCHOOL SUCCESS
Auditory Discrimination:


Comparisons of Discrimination and Identification Tasks
A Discrimination Task Teacher: Tell me if these sound the same: shhh (pause) ch . Student: No, they sound different. An Identification Task Teacher: Point to the card that shows the sound you hear. (pause): shhh. Student: (points to card) [Note: it is recommended that student also repeat the sound.] OR Teacher: Please tell me what you hear: sheep. Student: (optional: points to picture) sheep. Teacher: Cheep. Student: (optional: points to picture) cheep.
Auditory Discrimination and Students With Hearing Loss
Erber (1982) notes that professionals working with students who have hearing loss often use an auditory discrimination task to determine the cause of an erroneous response to a different auditory task. A phonics lesson, for example, might ask a student to identify the letter associated with the phoneme -e- (as in bed) – an auditory identification task. If the student points the letter a rather than e, the teacher might check to see if the student perceives the acoustic differences between the short e vowel sound and the short a vowel sound. During a discussion about farming wheat, a student who comments, “My mom doesn’t like wheat. She pulls it out and throws it away,” may be unfamiliar with the wheat plant and not hear the subtle difference between wheat and weeds. In the above examples, the identification errors likely occurred because the phonemes -a- and -e- and the words wheat and weed are acoustically similar and difficult to discriminate. The teacher could respond by asking, “What did you hear?” That question will prompt the student to produce a vowel or word that may not (due to an error in his speech production) match what he heard. Instead, the teacher can check the student’s ability to discriminate. Here are two examples of checking discrimination during the identification tasks described above.Examples of Discrimination as Error Analysis and Remediation
Example A. Teacher: Listen. Which vowel do you hear: bed? (an identification task) Student: (points to letter a) Teacher: Oh. That says /-a-/. Are these two sounds the same or different? Listen: /-e-/ (pause) /-a-/? Example B. Student (thought the teacher said “weed” when she actually said “wheat – an identification error) Teacher: Those words are almost the same, but the last sound is a little different. Listen: wheat (pause) weed. Do they sound the same to you? In Example A, if the student says the phonemes sound the same, the student has made an auditory error. The teacher can give the student feedback like, “Yes, those sounds are very close to each other. They are almost the same. But they are a little different. Listen again.” The sounds can then be produced slightly elongated to highlight the differences. If the student is asked to say the sounds, he will likely produce two sounds that sound very, very similar to each other. This may be a task for the speech specialist. The teacher, however, can spend one or two valuable minutes saying the sounds as she points to the letters, then 1 or 2 minutes more having the student listen and decide which sound he hears, with the teacher giving immediate feedback. In Example B, many students with hearing loss will not hear the difference between wheat and weed. The teacher can check the vocabulary by pointing to a picture of wheat and asking the student to name the plant. If the student is unable, the teacher can a quick explanation of the word, the differences between wheat, a product farmers sell and the weeds they kill or throw away. She would then draw attention to the final letter and sound and move on with the lesson. Auditory practice may not be necessary because if this student had been familiar with the wheat plant as a farming product, the auditory error would probably not have occurred.Improvement of Auditory Discrimination

More Resources for Auditory Discrimination
Free PD Webinars from CID – Central Institute for the DeafReferences
Erber, N. 1982 Auditory Training. A.G. Bell Association for the Deaf. Washington D.C. CURRICULA Learning to Listen Sounds Kit CAST – Contrasts for Auditory and Speech Training SPICE – Speech Perception Instructional Curriculum & Evaluation SPICE to Life Auditory Learning Curriculum Posted August 2019. This information was authored by Julia West, teacher of the deaf/hard of hearing who has taught students with hearing loss in private and public schools for over 20 years. She is co-author of the CID SPICE for Life Auditory Learning Curriculum and authors the Listening and Self-Advocacy sections of the Teacher Tools e-Magazine